Nobody can force him what to do. If he was at all confident in his coin's technology he wouldn't bow down to such whales. Especially the types of whales involved. No whale should be able to dictate the decisions the dev team make. It's the reason why they pulled out of Blocknet.
In fairness to Shadow and rynomster, any dev team that had access to the documents that Shadow had would have likely pulled out from the BlockNET as well while the opportunity was still there. You can't really fault them for making that decision.