There is no exclusive partner and the coin is still under full management of Myself(daily) and with assistance from the original Electronero core development team. There is a serious botnet targeting every cryptonote coin and we have given much consideration to the abilities and the capacity of the network it's consuming. If you think about it the network is very small, and the botnet consuming the majority of the hash on the chain now at this stage is only 2mH or 3mH if we had seen major hash I would be concerned but perhaps we enable CNv7 soon and reenable nice hash to our pools.. Thoughts?