Totient Labs shocked the VeChain community by announcing the discontinuation of their services on Sunday. The landing page of the VeForge Block Explorer left the following message:

Dear VeFam,

We are saddened to inform you that due to the lack of interest from the VeChain Foundation to support our efforts, we have no choice but to shut down the official VeChain blockchain explorer and Ledger wallet interface. This will go into effect on 10/21/2019 12:00 PM PDT, after which you will no longer be able to access these services.
In our two year journey, we built many of the core applications and services including:
Explore, VeChain’s official blockchain explorer.
Vault, Vechain’s official Ledger wallet interface.
Comet, the “MetaMask” for VeChain.
CometVerse, VeChain’s first digital collectible platform.
Valkyrie, a decentralized marketplace protocol.
VIP-191, a protocol upgrade that improved the versatility of fee delegation.

Over the past 7 months we have been attempting to work with the VeChain Foundation to receive some form of support so that we can continue providing core functionality and infrastructure to the VeChainThor blockchain. We informed them months in advance that if we were unable to receive support, that we would need to shut down our services. Unfortunately we did not receive support, and as a result we are unable to continue providing our services to VeChain.
We genuinely enjoyed our journey together with you, the VeChainThor community, and we thank you for all of the help, support, and the good times that we shared. We hope that in the future we can share other valuable projects with you in our mission to bring blockchain to the masses.
Sincerely,
Totient

VeChain wasted no time in responding by announcing they would be quickly replacing these two services. However, the confusion caused by this abrupt decision can be quite damaging and can be hard for the community to make sense of.

A quick word on the situation, from Ben Yorke:

Clinton and Kevin were personal friends of VeChain101, and we collaborated on more than one occasion. They were passionate about their work, and believed in what VeChain was trying to achieve. They often spoke about how the ecosystem could be improved, as evident by their hard work and innovation in proposing the VIP 191 fee delegation protocol. Their designs were eye-catching and professional, which was a bright spot on the ecosystem.

However, their passion was unsustainable without generous support from VeChain. For a development team in Silicon Valley, not factoring in a revenue model to their products was a dramatic oversight. It’s hard to blame the VeChain Foundation in this situation, as the point of a community project isn’t to rely solely on the funding of the ecosystem. At that point, they are no longer a third-party, but somewhere in between that and in-house development.

Still, their ingenuity will be missed by the VeChain community, and I personally hope that Totient is able to find a more sustainable business model that allows them to continue to develop products and services, especially ones that benefit the VeChain ecosystem. Their decision to leave is mostly an economic one – and nobody is really at fault here. At the end of the day, two companies made choices that represent their own best interests – as any of us would do under the circumstances.

In a few weeks, the discontinued services will be replaced by official ones, and things will return to normal. No tokens or nodes will be lost in the process, although some people might not have access to them for two weeks.

Looking forward to the future,
Ben Yorke

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