Addressing the CardStarter Community

Sundae Labs
4 min readJan 24, 2022

The SundaeSwap team has for the past few days been very concerned about the CardStarter investor community and their disappointment with not being part of the SundaeSwap DEX at launch or receiving any SUNDAE as rewards. For the past many months and continuing until today, SundaeSwap had been engaging with CardStarter on expanding our relationship to include an agreement where SUNDAE tokens could be earned by CardStarter investors that moved their holdings to the SundaeSwap DEX. However, despite giving the CardStater team the flexibility we felt they needed to address these important issues, no agreement has been reached and no substantive proposal has been made by the CardStarter team.

For these reasons, we would like to now share what we feel are a few relevant facts with the community, and what we propose to do to address the concerns of CardStarter investors.

  • The relationship between CardStarter and SundaeSwap is indeed based solely on a Marketing and Collaboration Agreement from June, as communicated publicly here: https://sundaeswap-finance.medium.com/cardstarter-chooses-its-favorite-ice-cream-flavor-b60744eca935
  • SundaeSwap cannot control how any other party to an agreement may characterize it to others, including their investors. However, we acknowledge that, out of enthusiasm for the relationship, members of our team have on two occasions chosen their words poorly when characterizing the Agreement and hoped-for future liquidity-provision relationship. When these misstatements are stacked against the many, many more correct statements and the public release mentioned before, we do not believe that SundaeSwap contributed to any misunderstandings by the CardStarter community as many have asserted.
  • The terms of the June Agreement are bound by a mutual non-disclosure provision as is routine with commercial agreements, so we cannot share full details of the Agreement without CardStarter’s consent.
  • We are compelled by circumstances to say two things, however. First, the Agreement is in no way a merger of the two companies and does not call for any similar acquisition, sale or other transaction.
  • Second, the Agreement did include a mutual promise to have good faith discussions regarding merging CardStarter liquidity to the SundaeSwap DEX once launched, and regarding distributing SundaeSwap tokens (when issued) as a reward to CardStarter investors for that liquidity. No money, tokens, or anything else of value was paid or promised by any party to the other in the June Agreement; SundaeSwap has not received any CARDS, CSWAP or other tokens at any time since then either.
  • We stand by our commitment to bring the CardStarter community to SundaeSwap, and feel that we have made every effort we could to reach a satisfactory conclusion to our negotiations with CardStarter. We have made several reasonable and constructive proposals over many months and have not received any substantive proposals in response since January 19.
  • It seems from the social media posts by CardStarter investors that CardStarter’s prior statements may have significantly mischaracterized both the level and frequency of their communications with the SundaeSwap team, as well as their overall efforts to reach a conclusion to negotiations. With so much on the line — not just with the reputations of both organizations, but with the well-being of the entire CardStarter community — we feel that CardStarter should have responded by now to our good faith efforts to address this disconcerting situation and reach agreement.
  • Because of the lack of substantive proposals or communications, and the changed circumstances of CardStarter projects since we started discussion in June, we have reluctantly concluded that no agreement with CardStarter will be possible at this time. We have therefore advised CardStarter that we have satisfied our obligations to negotiate in good faith and will no longer consider entering into any additional agreements with CardStarter.
  • However, in light of the apparent representations made to CardStarter investors by CardStarter based on our name and project, the SundaeSwap team will provide a cross-chain airdrop of 20,000,000 SUNDAE tokens to holders of CSWAP tokens as of January 20. A snapshot of holders as of that date will be used to determine recipients, and we will announce more details soon about how they can claim their portion of the allotted SUNDAE tokens (a traditional airdrop of Cardano tokens to an Ethereum address is of course not possible, so additional steps are needed). One important detail is that we will cap the number of SUNDAE that one can receive as an anti-whale measure.
  • We do not expect that this airdrop will make anyone ‘whole’ or make up for the distress of the last few days. But we are limited in the steps that we can take particularly given the lack of substantive proposals from CardStarter. We hope that this act, taken voluntarily and on behalf of the SundaeSwap community, reinforces our genuine concern for CardStarter investors, and desire to do what we can to help redress the present circumstances.

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Sundae Labs

Building sweeter blockchain infrastructure. One scoop at a time. Website: https://sundae.fi/