According to CryptoPotato, Ahmad Shadid, the founder of the decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) protocol io.net, has stepped down as CEO with immediate effect. Despite past allegations against him, Shadid stated that his resignation is to allow io.net to progress without any distractions. The current Chief Operating Officer, Tory Green, will take over as CEO. Shadid also expressed his intention to donate one million of io.net’s soon-to-be-released tokens from his personal holdings to the Internet of GPUs Foundation to support the ecosystem's growth.
In response to Shadid's announcement, Tory Green acknowledged that under Shadid's leadership, io.net has become one of the fastest-growing AI companies worldwide. Green assured that the company would continue to pursue Shadid's vision of becoming the world's largest AI compute network and making AI accessible globally. He highlighted the company's achievements, including onboarding approximately 20,000 cluster-ready GPUs and serving AI companies like WonderAI, Krea, and Leonardo with end-to-end AI inference and model training workloads. Green also assured stakeholders that the company's operations had been smoothly transitioned under his oversight and mentioned that more details regarding the leadership team changes would be shared in the coming days.
The io.net token, IO, is set to debut on Binance’s Launchpool on June 11 at 12:00 am UTC, with an initial release of 95,000,000 tokens and a total supply capped at 800,000,000 tokens. Shadid's resignation has raised concerns that he might sell his IO tokens at launch and disappear. However, Shadid has addressed these concerns by stating that his tokens are locked for four years and that no investor, adviser, or team member can sell their monthly vested tokens until June 2025.