So IOHK announced today that they have a new partnership with New Balance, a footwear company. As a long time investor I was pretty thrilled that after several missed deadlines, like Shelley, which should have been out a LONG time ago. Turns out that the according to the agreement they made the company will indeed use the public blockchain. Theres a catch, which if you don't look, will deceive you. I got banned from the subreddit, for pointing this out in 20 minutes. There were more upvotes, but no one seemed to care about the fact, that was also stated in the article, that the solution will not include the usage of the token. Which is the exact purpose of the token. To provide fuel for the future smart contracts and transactions in the system.

This means, that they will be able to use the blockchain, without actually participating and purchasing tokens and providing investors with return for their extreme risk in investing in this project, only generating income for IOHK and Charles to spend on felt hats, and not for the people who funded this in the first place.

There have always been a huge shilling team behind cardano, only beaten by maybe tron and chainlink, but it got to the point where they celebrate losing their life savings on the subbreddit and the general sentiment that you should be glad that you can support Charles Hoskinsons vacations and you shouldnt expect anything in return.

Also, how does this benefit New Balance? Why isn't a centralized database good enough to check the authenticity of their products? It's all so shady, this is not VeChain, which is a failed project, for the exact same reason I assume. It has no use case.

So in the past month i got really heavily invested in monero for the long hodl, because I really believe in this project, but after reading some reddit FUD I became a bit concerned. In the monero cons thread someone mentioned that competition like zcash for example might be able to easily outpace monero as we close to global adoption, simply because of the difference in the funding structure of the two coins, citing that projects like zcash have big money behind them instead of relying solely on the donations from the community.

Could someone alleviate my concerns about this? I intend to hodl, but if this concern is legit I might have to take this into account.