Coindesk reported that the U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into Saber Labs founders Ian and Dylan Macalinao. The probe is reportedly surrounding how the brothers utilized various pseudonymous identities to orchestrate inaccurate crypto gain metrics.
The brothers reportedly crafted over 11 various identities across the web to “build an ecosystem of interlocking financial products that double and triple-counted crypto deposits by passing tokens between themselves.” Moreover, the scheme reportedly “boosted a key growth metric for Solana by billions of dollars,” in 2021.
Saber Labs Founders Probed for Fraudulent Activity
2022 had seen one of the largest financial crimes in history occur in the crypto sector, with the fraud of FTX. Now, it appears as though American authorities are probing another potential financial crime in the crypto sphere to start the new year.
Coindesk has reported the U.S. Department of Justice is launching an investigation into Saber Labs Founders Ian and Dylan Macaliano. The brothers are the founders of the Solana Stablecoin Exchange and orchestrated a web of pseudonymous identities to increase a key metric for Solana in 2021.
The duo would reportedly craft a plethora of fake online identities that would “double and triple” count crypto deposits by “passing tokens between themselves.” Coindesk also gained access to an unpublished blog by Ian Macalinao noting, “The metric to optimize for in Summer 2021 was [total value locked (TVL)]” according to the report.
Adding, “TVL can only count if protocols are built separately, so I devised a scheme to maximize Solana’s TVL: I would build protocols that stack on top of each other, such that a dollar could be counted several times.” Conversely, investigators are probing for information regarding sabers’ various crypto projects. These include Defi app Sunny Aggregator, and Cashio, a stablecoin project that was the victim of a hack that lost millions in March.
Conclusively, Ian wrote the code for both using similar fake identities. “If an ecosystem is all built by a few people, it does not look as authentic,” he stated. Adding “I wanted to make it look like a lot of people were building on our protocol rather than ship 20+ disjoin [sic] programs as one person.”