Last week, Nikolai Mushegian, the MakerDAO co-founder and the decentralized stablecoin Dai, was found dead in the city of Puerto Rico.
According to local media reports, the co-founder of the crypto lending platform died due to drowning as the sea currents on the Condado beach dragged him down.
By the time his body was rescued in San Juan, Mushegian did not have any vital signs.
The incident
It should be noted that Condado beach is regarded as one of the most dangerous places for swimmers in the world, as it reports indicated that eight people lost their lives there last year.
On the morning of October 28th, the unfortunate incident of Mushegian’s drowning had been reported to the local authorities.
The police report disclosed that the MakerDAO co-founder had actually been a San Juan resident. A local prosecutor and the San Juan Homicide Division reportedly investigated the scene.
Nikolai Mushegian
Also known as the ‘DAI architect’, Mushegian was quite a popular individual in the crypto community because he was a part of a number of projects in the crypto industry.
The crypto developer is also well-known for the work he did on Rai and Rico, the two forks of MakerDAO, and he was also involved in BitShares, a proof-of-stake blockchain network.
Not only did he co-found MakerDAO, but he also helped launch Balancer, the automated market maker.
On October 31st, Rune Christensen, the chief executive and founder of MakerDAO, took to Twitter to talk about Mushegian.
He said that Mushegian had made some important inputs in the development of Maker and he had done some vital work in the early days of Ethereum.
Contributions
The CEO said that during the early days of smart contracts and Ethereum, Nikolai had been one of the only people who had been able to predict the possibility of smart contracts getting hacked.
He was also the one who came up with the security-oriented approach in the design of smart contracts that exists today.
According to the chief executive, Maker could not have existed without Nikolai today. Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, also took to Twitter to talk about Mushegian.
He said that they had known each other since the Bitshares days. Hoskinson described Mushegian as an extremely bright, young man who enjoys a variety of interests from Urbit to game theory.
More details
He also stated that the 29-year old coder also had an in-depth understanding of technology. Craig Seller, the co-creator of Tether, said that the death of Mushegian happened just a few days after a proposal was approved by the MakerDAO community.
It was about the custody of the USD Coin worth $1.6 billion with the crypto exchange, Coinbase. Mushegian was also very active on social media.
He had 5,500 Twitter followers at the time of writing and he tweeted just a few hours before his death in which he referred to alleged blackmail from Mossad and the Central Intelligence Agency.
He had made similar statements previously as well and even talked of a potential ‘suicide’ as his future by the CIA.