Tl;dr, the people who started it have decided to shut it down. It both became a burden, and the mission is complete.
While it is still officially active, it stopped with activities in May of this year. That is just about 7 years after it was launched.
I found the launch ANN here on the forum:
Why are you shutting it down?
It’s a long story, and you may have caught glimpses of it over the last year or so. Basically, the Foundation is being legally bullied by a former board member, and that has inflicted massive costs on the Foundation (everything is expensive as fuck in the Netherlands). This is why we have removed the donation links as well, to prevent new donations from feeding the same legal expenses monster. It just did not feel right.
Above all that, the ROAST stack was the last project. There were no plans for after ROAST anyway. I mean, there are plans, but nothing a non-profit can pull off.
What will happen to the assets under control?
The last donations happened years ago, more precisely 2-3 years ago. So there was not much in liquid assets to begin with. Liquid assets were spent to the last cent on the ROAST project and core development. And uh, notaries and legal counsil.
Peercoins were given as grants to developers who expressed a desire to continue with their work after the foundation, more precisely:
@MatthewLM - for his continued R&D on coinlib and DLCs.
@backpacker69 - for his continued efforts to maintain the reference client.
And 100k was granted to PR Connect for marketing/promotion of the new ROAST tech stack.
The remaining 11Xk coins will partially be used to pay the costs of shutdown, and the remainder will be donated to the new foundation.
A new foundation?
Yeah, a community member has noticed the situation and started a new foundation in California, USA. I believe they will be sharing details with the community soon.
None of the board members of the Dutch Stichting Peercoin Foundation will participate with this new foundation, so I do not know much about it really. We did agree to donate any remaining assets to the new organization as soon as possible to help new people to carry the torch further.
My personal notes
I got tired.
I need to do something new, something that is not associated with the crypto/blockchain world.
As you may have noticed, my stance on crypto has been extremely negative for 7-8 years now, but I am around, trusting that it will get better and that criminals will eventually be jailed. But, recently, with political changes in the USA, it became evident that nobody will be jailed and that criminal behavior will be rewarded. Crypto supposed to make the world better, not worse. I can no longer participate in a movement that is undermining the very foundations of our civilization. Crypto became extremely toxic, and the poison is getting stronger.
Another thing that makes me sorrowful is this overwhelming lethargy in this community. For example, the biggest and most complex project in the history of this community (ROAST stack) was released how many months ago?
How many have tested it? Who has tried it out and tried to teach the fellow peer about it? Where are the blog posts? Tweets? Reddit posts? In such a climate, how can I expect anyone to start businesses around the stack as I had envisioned when the project was announced?
Nobody is doing anything to restart wrapmeister project either…
Will I still be involved? Yeah, this peercoin thing has been my hobby for over a decade now, and I still kind of enjoy this p2p stuff. I will keep visiting the forum and discord, packaging the reference node for linux, writing blog posts and helping out in general. Just don’t expect me to take the initiative.
On a side note, I think I still have Patchcoins for the new foundation whenever they want them. It’s been months since I looked to see if they were still there (but they should be!).