Puerto Rican authorities reportedly identified the person deceased in a drowning accident to be MakerDAO co-founder Nikolai Mushegian.
On Oct. 29, local media outlets reported that the 29-year old Nikolai Mushegian showed no vital signs after rescue personnel arrived at the site. Mushegian, a resident of San Juan, allegedly drowned after being swept away by currents on a beach in Condado.
Mushegian was known for his work on the stablecoin DAI, designing the core mechanics of the original contract. He also contributed to infrastructure on automated market maker Balancer and building early Ethereum Virtual Machine blocks with Dappsys.
Most notably, Mushegian was credited for his role in preventing what could have been a catastrophic hack of MakerDAO six years ago. A few weeks before The DAO hack, Mushegian and his team identified the same recursive withdrawal bug in Maker and was successfully able to mitigate an impending exploit.
“Nikolai was one of the only people in the early days of Ethereum and smart contracts who was able to predict the possibility of smart contract hacks and invented the security-oriented approach to smart contract design we know today. Maker would have been toast without him,” wrote MakerDAO co-founder and CEO Rune Christensen on Twitter.
A number of key personalities in the crypto space also shared their condolences on Mushegian’s passing, including Uniswap’s venture lead Matteo Leibowitz, who called it a “big loss for the industry.”
For most people, however, a more concerning message was from Muchgian’s own Twitter account a few days earlier. On Oct. 28, Mushegian tweeted that the CIA, Mossad and “pedo elite” were running a sex trafficking blackmail ring out of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean islands.
“They are going to frame me with a laptop planted by my ex gf who was a spy. They will torture me to death,” said Mushegian, in his last tweet.
The stablecoin innovator’s cryptic tweet led some to speculate that Mushegian’s death was not, in fact, an accident.
