Zaki Manian of Cosmos resigns, but will continue to work on the project

Zaki Manian, director of Tendermint Labs, the firm behind the development of the Cosmos blockchain network, has resigned.

Manian, however, will continue to work on Cosmos, Decrypt reported Tuesday. “The best way to get the work done was for me to leave,” he said.

Earlier this month, Manian posted a strongly worded thread on Twitter. "Over the last 6 months, Jae [Jae Kwon, founder and CEO of Tendermint] has obsessively focused on Virgo while neglecting and under resourcing IBC [Inter-Blockchain Communication]," Manian wrote.

Later in the thread, Manian said, "For the past month, Jae has subjected every internal communication channel to religious discrimination, loyalty tests and abusive rants."

Internal struggles of Cosmos became public at the time, and Manian subsequently threatened to quit the project and take the bulk of the engineering team with him, insiders told Decrypt.

“There are people inside the company that want to portray this as a power struggle between me and Jae, and this as an outcome and me threatening x, y and z, But it was really me saying I don’t see a way in this arrangement to get the work done,” Manian told the news source.

Tendermint has not yet issued an official statement about Manian's resignation.

Cosmos, built on top of the Tendermint protocol, is an interoperability network. It helps connect and facilitate transactions between independent blockchains. The project is backed by notable investors, including Paradigm and Bain Capital.