Public Statement

First and foremost I would like to deeply apologise to all affected parties, I know at this point nothing is going to take back my actions and I have to face the consequences, I am also in no way, shape, or form attempting to victimise myself, but this is the culmination of what snowballed into a crippling gambling addiction and probably multiple other psychological factors that went by unchecked for too long.

I have not been myself for the longest time, the last few years have been time and time again me hurting people who did not deserve it in any way, more often than not those closest to me.

These situations started spreading from my interpersonal relationships to my professional relationships, the first instance of this dates back to the time of the first Breakpoint and the victims were my brother and Max from Mango DAO, coincidentally what someone else did to me and my brother was the same thing I ended up doing to Max - I know merely apologising for this is and will never be enough.

After Project Citadel failed to get off the ground due to a lot of things happening with our personal lives, I was grounded for a bit and things seemed to have gotten better, I’d found my footing with Cypher - Barrett, Alex, Mark, Patrick, Meet, these guys became family to me, I loved them and the mission we had, I worked and worked, I tried to innovate within the DEX design space, I failed, I worked some more and I broke.

Barrett is definitely the person who was hurt the most throughout all of this, I know likely nothing I say or do will make things better - perhaps other than rotting in jail. To address the elephant in the room, the allegations are true, I took the funds and gambled them away. I didn’t run away with it, nor did anyone else.

I let too many things pile up in my head for too long, I let them consume me, and ultimately they took the best of me - I completely lost it late last year and earlier this year to the point where simply trying to hold it together was impacting everything else in my life, distancing myself from long time friends, family, not being able to meet the deadlines I set for myself, having erratic behaviours, you name it.

The latest victims of all this were Titan, SSKP and the extended Bankmen team, through which I helped onboard into web3 a long time irl friend of mine, who also ends up impacted by this in a way.

There’s too many names to name, whether they were financially impacted by this or just dragged along through the mud because I couldn’t take care of my issues and only created bigger problems. Some of them have/are/will be in front of firing squads - Tiago, Eduardo, maybe Christian, who knows else, if you’re on the firing squad and reading this, all I ask is that you consider that these people were simply dragged into something they had nothing to do with in the first place.

Cited, Δcammm, Bones, some of you I messed up things with and managed to mend them after some time, some of you I couldn’t; I’m sorry.

It’s been the most gruelling thing to write all of this since I was let go from Ranger late last week, I currently have no energy left whatsoever and considering no one is going to want anything to do with me after all this, I believe there’s no way forward and it’s actually over for me.

Whatever comes next is in God’s hands.

I’m sorry I fucked up,

hoak