Nikolai Mushegian, a respected contributor to the crypto ecosystem, was found dead a couple of days back on the beach behind Ashford Hospital in Condado, Puerto Rico after being swept away by sea currents. Per a local media report, rescue personnel managed to rescue his body, but it no longer showed vital signs.
Even though Mushegian had a fairly long career in the crypto space, he was not very publicly known. However, per attestations on social media platforms including that of a Tether co-creator, he was a stablecoin innovator, BitShares contributor, DAI architect, and the co-founder of MakerDAO and Balancer Labs.
A day before his death, Mushegian tweeted that the “CIA and Mossad and pedo elite” were going to frame him and torture him to death. He said that they were running a sex-trafficking entrapment blackmail ring and would frame him with a laptop planted by his ex-girlfriend, who was a spy.
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Charles Hoskinson tweeted on Tuesday that he knew Mushegian from back in the BitShares days. The Cardano founder claimed that he was an “extremely bright man” who had a “wide array of interests.” He added that he was “sad” to see what happened.
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Commenting on if he knew how things unfolded, he said,
“Yeah. Either he went crazy or had a ride on the Epstein express. We’ll probably never know. That’s how these things work.”
Notably, Mushegian donated more than $1 million in crypto to his alma matter towards the end of 2019. Outlining the same, a report back then noted,
On the last day of 2019, around $1.3 million in cryptocurrency was donated by Carnegie Mellon Class of 2014 Alumni Nikolai Mushegian in the form of 3,200 MKR tokens. This is one of the largest known, and publicly acknowledged, donations of cryptocurrency to a higher educational institution for 2019.