Nikolai Arcadie Mushegian, the former co-founder of MakerDAO ($MKR) and Balancer ($BAL), was found dead on Condado beach in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Friday, October 28th.
The 29-year-old cryptocurrency developer reportedly drowned at Condado Beach in Puerto Rico. Nikolai Mushegian had been working on multiple blockchain projects and was hailed as an expert on decentralized financial platforms and stablecoins.
Mr Mushegian was known for his work developing smart contracts and his ability to secure them from hacks. Nikolai Mushegian was regarded as a very bright individual within the blockchain community.
Notably, Nikolai Mushegian was one of MakerDAO’s founders. Nikolai Mushegian was the technical partner of Rune Christensen (Founder of MakerDAO) and contributed to MakerDAO’s decentralised stablecoin DAI and its protocol. According to his website, Nikolai Mushegian has been working on the MakerDAO protocol since early 2015. However, he has not been involved in the platform’s recent developments.
Mr Mushegian was the founder of the automated portfolio management and trading platform Balancer ($BAL). He also contributed to Ethereum, BitShares, as well as RAI, a fork of DAI by Reflexer labs.
According to news outlet Primera Hora, the San Juan Homicide Division and local prosecutors are investigating Mushegian’s death. Local Puerto Rican news outlet, El Nuevo Dia, claims the death resulted from accidental drowning. However, at this time, there is a range of mysterious circumstances surrounding his untimely death.
In the hours before his death, Mushegian published a tweet claiming he was about to be framed for sex trafficking and that was going to be tortured to death.
MakerDAO declined to comment on Nikolai’s death out of respect for his family and wife.
In the months before his death, Nikolai worked on a crypto project called Rico. Rico is a free-floating decentralized stablecoin platform intended to be the successor of DAI. The Rico platform is designed in the way that DAI was originally intended to be but without compromises.
On Monday, Rune Christensen tweeted, “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.”.
