MakerDAO Co-Founder, Nikolai Mushegian, has Passed Away 

According to police reports, Nikolai Mushegian, an Innovator in stablecoins and co-founder of MakerDAO, has passed away in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This comes five days after the MakerDAO community approved a custodial agreement with Coinbase.  The 29-year-old, commonly identified as Nicolai Arcadie Muchgian, was carried away at 9:15 am after the incident was reported.

Rescuers reportedly found his dead corpse, which they were able to collect. The victim resided in San Juan, according to the authorities. Agent Rosario of the Isla Verde Tourist Precinct was in charge of addressing the grievance.

Reports of Nikolai’s Death stir up reactions

Craig Sellars, co-creator at Tether_to, took his remarks to Twitter after the report of Nikolai’s death. Although Craig never met the victim, he claims they had mutual acquaintances on the island who were all devastated by the loss.

“As I learned more about him, I came to appreciate his brilliant mind and his profoundly significant contributions to the blockchain community.” He adds.

Craig refers to Nikolai’s actions six years ago, which prevented MakerDAO from being hacked the same way that TheDAO had been.

Nikolai Mushegian gained fame as a result of his actions in preventing that disastrous hack on MakerDAO due to the same loophole that had allowed tens of millions of dollars worth of Ether to be taken from DAO that year, causing a hardfork of the Ethereum blockchain and an ideological split in the community. Nikolai had then quoted,

“In Maker Market, an experimental decentralized exchange that MakerDAO developed to trade their token MKR safely, the DappHub team discovered the same recursive withdrawal flaw a few weeks prior to the infamous breach of DAO, We proceeded fast to remove all of the ETH from the exchange by using the bug ourselves.”

Adding,

“After then, it was given back to its proper owners, and the issue was fixed, preventing an impending catastrophe. Because to our clean code and logical interfaces, which reduced the attack surface we had to secure, we were able to do this. Since that time, no active contracts made for MakerDAO have caused us any problems.”

Nikolai’s Milestones

As part of his many blockchain initiatives, Nikolai developed best practices for earned value management programming as part of dappsys, which was one of his most successful endeavors. These include WETH, the top contract by ETH balance, DSAuth flexible authorization pattern, DSProxy delegate call-based dynamic atomic composition, and DSNote generic logging tool. Additionally, he contributed to the design of the first Maker/DAI contract system and the first iteration of the Balancer Automated Market Maker.

Nikolai also made contributions to the research on DeFi. Nikolai Mushegian gave his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, 3,200 MKR tokens today valued at around $1.38 million (CMU). The establishment of a research program for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols and decentralized applications, according to Mushegian, was the goal of his gift (dapps). 

In response to why he made the contribution, Mushegian stated:

“I am quite concerned about the rising rent-seeking conduct displayed by some of the major participants in this industry, as well as by established banks and tech behemoths.”

Nikolai’s death serves as a big blow to the DAO community. The cryptocurrency sector also falls victim to its demise, having lost a brilliant mind determined to better the system. The exact causes of his death have not yet been disclosed.