The bit about paying for publicity doesn’t bother me.
Edit: I haven’t found anything egregious that the CEO has said, or anything really sketchy. The shard failure warnings look serious, but the issues look closed
https://x.com/generall931/status/1809303448837582850?s=46
There used to be a benchmarking issue with a founder that was particularly egregious but I can’t find it anymore.
The sharding and consensus issues were from around a year and a half ago, so maybe it’s gotten better.
There are just so many options in the space, I don’t know why you’d go with one of the least correct vendors (whether or not the correctness is deception is a different question that I can’t answer)
That would be me