According to two sources, the U.S. Department of Justice is looking into Ian and Dylan Macalinao, the siblings behind the Solana stablecoin exchange Saber Labs.
CoinDesk reported in August that the Macalinao brothers had created a system of related financial products that doubled and tripled counted crypto deposits by moving tokens amongst themselves, prompting the inquiry. At the height of the crypto bull market in 2021, their efforts raised a crucial growth statistic for Solana by billions of dollars and, according to Ian, pumped up the price of SOL, the native token of the Solana network.
According to one of the persons questioned, the investigation team is actively searching the internet for details on crypto projects related to Saber. That includes Cashio, a stablecoin startup that lost millions of dollars in a hack in March, and the decentralised-finance (DeFi) yield-farming program Sunny Aggregator. Ian, behind aliases, wrote the source code for both projects.
Ian stated, “If an ecosystem is all built by a few people, it does not look as authentic. I wanted to make it look like a lot of people were building on our protocol rather than ship 20+ disjoint [sic] programs as one person.”
Due to the popularity of TVL, DefiLlama, a service that compiles industry statistics, revised how it displays the measure. After the article, the Macalinao brothers scrapped their intention to migrate Saber to the Aptos blockchain. They pulled out of the crypto VC industry as founders of Protagonist VC and gave Marinade, another Solana-based DeFi protocol, authority over some of their anonymously developed projects.
The stablecoin exchange and cornerstone of the brothers’ DeFi network, Saber, is still active: At the time of publication, it had processed $4.4 million in trades during the previous 24 hours. Even though Saber’s Discord server—where users go to ask questions and get updates—is almost abandoned, Ian has fought to preserve that project’s infrastructure.
Flat-lining token prices mean that projects like Sunny and Cashio are effectively doomed. Users are furious and questioning where the creators are, flooding their Discord servers with negative feedback.