EXCLUSIVE: War of words erupts following the departure of Moon co-founder and CTO

Co-founder and former CTO of Moon Technologies Alexander Ang has left the company due to disagreements over user privacy and allegedly contentious terms and conditions.

Since leaving, Ang has made several Reddit posts outlining his views on the situation.

The Moon browser extension was designed to provide users with an augmented shopping experience that enables them to shop online with crypto on sites such as Amazon.

According to Ang, Moon CEO Kenneth Kruger has allegedly been ordering the collection of data belonging to users – which if true is a breach of GDPR and privacy laws.

Coin Rivet reached out to Mr Kruger, who has vehemently denied the allegations, stating:

“I’ll be releasing a statement in the coming days providing additional information. The individual has made a lot of serious and false allegations against the company and me personally. They will be addressed accordingly.”

Ang has stated that no user has been explicitly asked if they would prefer to opt out of the tracking.

Moon has also allegedly been extracting users’ Coinbase API keys into its backend and storing them in plaintext.

Ang is urging users to uninstall the browser extension and revoke their Coinbase API keys.

War of words

These accusations led to a war of words between Ang and Kruger on one of Ang’s Reddit posts in r/Litecoin. (For reference, Ang is u/angzhanyu and Kruger is u/binarytree.)

In one of the comments made by Ang on that particular post, he states Moon Technologies is not “legally authorised” to make transactions with Amazon through Moon.

Ang writes: “I can verify this codebase. No purchase made before 24 February 2019 has even been completed under the entity of Moon Technologies.

“My legal representatives will be in touch soon. You have acted in bad faith to our users, upheld no honour, morality, ethics and put our community at risk.”

Alexander Ang speaks out

Coin Rivet contacted Ang for a comment.

Ang noted: “Moon was created to accelerate the vision of a decentralised financial economy by creating a bridge between fiat and crypto.

“I proposed Moon to my co-founder, Kenneth, as I was really bored of what I was doing consulting for other start-ups that I had no stake in. I’ve always believed that cryptocurrency is the future, but just not in the state it is in now.

“In retrospect, I should not have been so afraid of the spotlight and relied on my co-founder to deliver my vision.”

Throughout building the technology, Ang stated how he and Kruger “constantly butted heads on many issues, which is why we eventually blew up.”

“His start-up experience and teachings had influenced many of his unethical decisions, which I felt were not appropriate for this venture.”

He closed our conversation by discussing how the crypto community needs to rethink how to mix crypto with business.

“With third parties, it doesn’t matter how good the pitch is. There are always agendas, and agendas are what created the financial system we are in today.

“If we are to create the crypto economy of tomorrow, we should go back to how the original authors of Bitcoin intended it to be. P2P, open source, anonymous, yet secure and credible – the biggest challenge to prevent projects such as Silk Road.”

Coin Rivet will be providing updates on the story as it unfolds.