According to El Nuevo Dia, Nikolai Mushegian, an early developer of MakerDAO, the most prominent decentralised financial network and a contributor to many crypto projects, was discovered dead on Friday in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
According to the news story, Nicolai Arcadie Muchgian, a 29-year-old male, was pulled by water currents near Condado Beach. The beach patrols recovered his body from the water, but there were no signs of life. According to the article, the region is notorious for its dangerously violent ocean currents, which have caused multiple deaths.
MakerDAO co-founder and developer Nikolai Mushegian was found dead on the beach in Puerto Rico close to Condado Beach.
Days before his death, Muchegian had made the tweets which made serious accusations against powerful organizations. pic.twitter.com/vxOMqd9L3L
— NFM | Non-Fungible Media (@NFM3DIA_) November 2, 2022
Mushegian was hailed as a prolific architect of blockchain-based decentralised financial platforms and stablecoin systems for his contributions to creating several blockchain-based initiatives.
According to his website, he was the first technical collaborator of MakerDAO creator Rune Christensen on the project and worked on the system and its decentralised stablecoin DAI between 2015 and 2018. A MakerDAO contributor informed CoinDesk that he was not recently participating in the protocol’s development.
Additionally, he co-founded the automated market maker Balancer and Reflexer’s RAI, an ether-backed stablecoin fork of DAI.
Recently, he was working on a cryptocurrency project dubbed Rico. This free-floating decentralised stablecoin system promised to be the spiritual successor of DAI and was developed without compromises as DAI was initially intended.
Christensen tweeted on Monday that Nikolai was one of the few people in the early days of Ethereum and smart contracts who could foresee the risk of smart contract breaches. He created the security-focused approach to smart contract design that we use today. The maker would have perished in his absence.
MakerDAO declined to comment out of respect for Nikolai and his family, according to an email from a team representative.
