Our Editor in Chief @mpmcsweeney wrote a great op-ed about Blockstack's million user fiasco. I really recommend everyone to read it, it's not paywalled. I will briefly summarize what happened below
theblockcrypto.com/post/55531/wha…
theblockcrypto.com/post/55531/wha…
On January 29th, Blockstack announced that it had garnered 1 million “verified users.” In doing so, it unlocked $6.8 million that it previously raised from investors on the condition it would reach this milestone. Messari covered this at face value
How did Blockstack define verified users? In the filing with the SEC, it said a user is verified if they either confirm their phone number, verify their social media or pass KYC. sec.gov/Archives/edgar… 
According to data, there were 156k total usernames by Nov 6, 504k by Dec 8 and 1.97 million usernames by Jan 29. That means that from Dec 8 until Jan 29 (~50 days), Blockstack supposedly added nearly 1.5 million usernames and at least 50% of them would have pass verification
So where did the one million verified users come from? A little over 300k+ supposedly came from Blockain's airdrop. It’s worth noting that Blockchain.com was compensated for the airdrop and the total payment was dependent on the number of verified users that received it.
But where did other 700k supposedly verified users come from? Especially in such a short period of time? I have literally no idea. Yet the independent advisory board somehow determined that under the pre-set guidelines, Blockstack met these requirements
Further – and these are, perhaps, more subjective queries – should the people who were airdropped STX tokens even be counted as verified users? Are they a “user” given that the traditional definition of that term is “one who uses”? STX tokens won't be unlocked until 2021 anyway
Following the pushback on the 1M user announcement, Blockstack released a blog post. But it focused on “username registrations” versus the term “verified users” as it existed in the original post, as well as the SEC filing that outlined the milestone. blog.blockstack.org/user-activity-…
.@muneeb himself pointed out: “the privacy focus of our network makes it nearly impossible to measure active users, so by design, there is no way to collect activity data.” If that was true, why set such a goal at all? Why registered users since day one?
In short, I believe that Blockstack owns everyone an explanation. The definition that it filed with the SEC doesn't seem to correspond to what actually happened. It might also be time to ask the board how they arrived at their conclusion. We tried but with no responses.
The only reasonable explanation that would make sense to me is that investors simply wanted to give Blockstack the money regardless. So investors on the board voted in their favor regardless of what the original definitions were. I can't come up with any other explanation
*Why not registered users since day one?
