> took a private key from KMS

They used KMS to sign the minting operation, but they didn't "take" the key, AWS KMS doesn't let you extract keys.

If their coin requires a web service to process each transaction, then an offline key isn't very useful.

You can criticize their design, but you can't have a dude burning a CD-ROM every time someone wants some coins.

I really liked these benchmarks, and would check in with them from time to time.

No benchmark is perfect, but these ones cover such a wide variety of different languages and frameworks, it's a good resource for getting a rough idea of the kind of performance that a given stack is capable of.

I don't know much about TechEmpower the company, it seems to be a small consultancy, maintaining this project probably takes non insignificant resources from them.

The end of the project seems kind of unceremonious, but they don't owe anything to anyone.

Hopefully an active fork emerges.