There's the further detail of Handshake, which Lee appears to be deeply involved in, which is a cryptocurrency that in essence claims the DNS roots as its own (part of the marketing strategy of Handshake appears to have been some sort of "airdrop" --- I'm not a cryptocurrency person and may be using that term wrong --- of coins to open source projects; I don't know if that's connected to the FOSS donations Lee keeps referencing).

I've seen more than one person on HN express confusion about what "decentralizing" means in the context of Freenode's DNS, which seems to be the core of the controversy here, and do wonder myself whether this has something do with Handshake.

(Handshake is a deeply silly project, but it's not at all clear to me whether it is or isn't implicated in this drama).