MakerDAO co-founder Nikolai Mushegian tweeted the CIA and Mossad would torture and kill him. He drowned 4 hours later. Today is his 33rd birthday.

Most people in crypto have used something Nikolai Mushegian built without ever knowing his name.

He co-founded MakerDAO in 2015. He designed DAI's collateralized debt position — the foundational mechanism behind decentralized lending. He co-built Wrapped Ether, making ETH compatible with ERC-20 and unlocking the entire token ecosystem that followed. He identified the same recursive withdrawal vulnerability inside MakerDAO's code that wiped out The DAO in 2016 — and patched it weeks before the hack.

Rune Christensen after his death: "Maker would have been toast without him."

He left MakerDAO in 2018. Not over money. Over USDC.

MakerDAO was moving toward using USDC as collateral to stabilize DAI's peg. To Mushegian this was a betrayal of everything DAI was supposed to be. You cannot build a censorship-resistant financial system on a censorable foundation. Circle can freeze any USDC wallet on a government order. He walked out.

He spent the next four years trying to build what DAI was supposed to be — a stablecoin backed entirely by ETH with no centralized collateral, no freeze function, no government kill switch.

He moved to Puerto Rico in 2021. He lived in a $6 million home in Condado, San Juan. He worked. And he started posting things that alarmed the people who knew him.

On October 28, 2022, at 4:57 AM, he posted his final tweet:

"CIA and Mossad and pedo elite are running some kind of sex trafficking entrapment blackmail ring out of Puerto Rico and caribbean islands. They're going to frame me with a laptop planted… Don't let them get away with it."

His body was found in the ocean at 9:15 AM. Four hours and eighteen minutes later.

The official cause of death: drowning.

He was 29 years old. Today he would have turned 33.

The questions have never been closed. His X account and tweets are still live.