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, the original title: "Master of Anons: How a Crypto Developer Faked a DeFi Ecosystem", compiled by Odaily author Shiwen.

For crypto user Saint Eclectic, Sunny Aggregator (a DeFi aggregator on Solana) is doing something a little out of the ordinary.

Sunny’s native token quintupled during last summer’s bull run. In early September, when Sunny was less than two weeks old, billions of dollars in cryptocurrency were pouring into the yield farm.

Yet Saint and others still have questions: Who is behind Sunny? Why is this developer using the pseudonym "Surya Khosla"? Is its codebase audited? Is the user's cash safe?

“There was no indication of who Surya was,” Saint recalled recently, “and a lot of users didn’t feel safe putting their cryptocurrency in there.”

As it turned out, they were right to be skeptical. CoinDesk has learned that Surya, formerly known as Ian Macalinao, is the lead architect of Saber, the stablecoin exchange on Solana. He built the Sunny Aggregator on top of Saber.

Ian, a 20-something computer expert from Texas, developed as 11 independent developers, creating a huge chain network of DeFi protocols, projecting the value of billions of dollars of double computing into the Saber ecosystem . Last November, when the network was racing toward its apex, it briefly boosted Solana’s Total Value Locked (TVL) — a TVL that DeFi loyalists tend to regard as a barometer of on-chain activity.

People with knowledge of the matter confirmed the authenticity of the content.

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reached the peak

Ian's strategy worked for a while. By his count, Saber and Sunny at one point accounted for $7.5 billion of Solana's $10.5 billion TVL peak. (Billions of dollars were double-counted between his two agreements.)

"I believe it contributed to the price increase of SOL." Ian said when the price of SOL was $188.

According to data provider DeFiLlama, even though the Saber ecosystem began to lose momentum in mid-September 2021, the TVL of the Solana network continued to swell, reaching $15 billion around November 9, while Saber's TVL was 1.5 billion by then. Already down 64%."Ian stated that he disdains such"measure of vanity";although"It bothers me that Ethereum's TVL is much higher than Solana's", because in his opinion, DeFi projects on Ethereum are"Stacked

", deposits can be recalculated."I want to create a system very similar to this,"he wrote. One question is:"

If every protocol was built by the same team, then TVL would be even dumber as a metric. Therefore, I created more anonymous profiles.

Ian wears 11 masks."Ship Capital "In public, Ian and his brother Dylan refer to their anonymous personas as "friends" or "friends of friends." Their"Programmers Club is working on"My blueprint for an ideal DeFi ecosystem

", Ian wrote in an unpublished blog. Saber and its so-called LP token underpin everything."If an ecosystem is built by just a few people, it doesn't look so real,"Ian said in his blog post."

I wanted it to look like many people were building our protocol, rather than 20+ unrelated programs running as one person."Ian hopes that other encryption protocols can rely on Saber and achieve"its failure could bring down the whole system"degree, Dylan said on October 1, 2021."

Brother Ian had not provided any comment as of press time.

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"Witch Attack""There may be valid reasons for using anonymity. but,"anonymous

"Ian launched a sybil attack, abusing the trust of cryptocurrency users. (A sybil attack is when one computer on a network uses a false identity to gain adverse influence over the entire network.)"I'm revealing this because I'm sure I'll be found out.

However, Ian released "Saber Public Goods" in May to spread the prolific code of the "Saber Team" throughout Solana. Eight of Ian's 11 secret projects appear there. But they did not disclose the anonymity.

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"My Anonymous Army"

Ian founded Sunny Aggregator under the name Surya Khosla and in August 2021 Twitter. Sunny skeptic Saint Eclectic is hesitant to deposit his LP tokens into the project of the mysterious figure, who is an AI-generated face.

There's one factor in Surya's favor: Ian's puppet claims to "know very well" the Dylan brothers in real life. On September 9th last year, Dylan Macalinao tweeted: "I feel comfortable putting my own cryptocurrency into Sunny Aggregator" and "We reviewed their code".

Dylan gives Surya the credibility he needs to win the trust of doubters like Saint Eclectic."Surya Khosla "The problem is, the main developer

does not exist. Dylan's brother Ian founded Sunny Aggregator. Ian made up Surya.

This is the first time Ian has used a fake identity for Saber, and it's far from the last."Ian wrote in March 2022 that he has created 11"。

According to Ian's blog, he admits to creating a bunch of lesser known protocols like Crate (run by kiwipepper), aSOL (0xAurelion), Arrow (oliver_code), Traction.Market (0xIsaacNewton), Sencha (jjmatcha) and Venko App (ayyakovenko ), these DeFi Lego blocks are the jewels of the Saber ecosystem.

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Behavior Among Anonymous

Ian, Dylan, and Puppet Anonymous are constantly promoting the work of Ship Capital on social media. They compliment each other on each other's projects and constantly encourage and publicize the exploits of the builders.

On Dec. 29, Solana developer Armani Ferrante (real person) tweeted, "If you're not making mistakes, you're too slow," and five Ian puppets responded within four minutes:

@_kiwipepper responded: "As @simplyianm said, it was an experiment!" She was one of them herself.

Others waver in the face of the facts.

We have been unable to determine whether these remarks were made by Ian in the background of Twitter. But two people who have worked with Ship Capital recall inexplicable behavior among their team members: One character's Telegram account would come online after another logged out."Anyway, Ian states in an unpublished article:"

If you're a developer, it's easy to spot which open source protocols I've written: there's always a 'flake.nix' file that only I use."flake.nix "document.

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Start with Cashio

The Cashio project created by 0xGhostchain provides a compelling perspective on how “anonymous armies” can infuse double counting value into Saber.

Cashio only accepts Saber's LP tokens as collateral. That wasn't surprising back in November, when Saber was a big TVL with over $1 billion in TVL."automated market maker"automated market maker

, the main DeFi trading venue for stablecoin pairs on Solana.

Cashio relies on the Saber ecosystem project created by Ian's anonymous person to generate revenue."It first uses Crate to package Saber LP tokens into"Tokenized Basket"kiwipepper ", Ian used"This pseudonym established this basket. It sends these through a yield retargeting platform called Arrow"basket"oliver_code "——Ian"Surya "identity builds the platform. In the end, Cashio said it passed the"Larry Jarry "Sunny Aggregator and Ian with

Bet on these deposit derivatives in the Quarry established in the name of the company to obtain income. Profits flow to Cashio's treasury, managed by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

Confused? The same goes for Cashio's customers. CoinDesk asked two of Cashio's prominent users to explain the app's intricacies; neither of them were able to, because the app's associated page wasn't helpful.

What users care about is this: Cashio's DeFi machine accepts their Saber LP tokens and spits out CASH tokens.

This is a profitable trade. CASH holders can deposit their LP-backed stablecoins into the Sunny liquidity pool and earn 10%-30% returns. One trader said that if they deposit Saber LP tokens in Sunny instead of Cashio, they will only get 5%-10% profit. It doesn't matter that the same crypto asset is behind both.

This is the logic of DeFi currency Lego.

Forced deposits from Saber to Cashio to Crate to Arrow to Sunny or Quarry have a greater effect on Saber. According to Ian, it turned a $1 TVL into $6. Many DeFi projects measure their TVL by touting total user deposits."Ian wrote:"TVL can only be calculated if the agreement is established separately

, which explains why his anonymizer's protocol was built separately.

Both tokens plummeted 99%, according to data provider CoinGecko. The TVLs of Saber and Sunny were hardly better as they both fell by more than 96%.

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Cashio Hacked

Cashio imploded in a $52 million hack on March 23rd, a big pushback against Ship Capital."Ian said in an unpublished blog that he"Trying really hard to push people to put more money into Cashio", because he wrote its code. He made an agreement for their"disastrous

Apologizing for the loss, the protocol was created by him under a pseudonym and endorsed by his real identity.

In an unpublished post, Ian begged the hackers to return the funds. The hacker did later return $14 million of the $39 million demanded by victims."Ian wrote that if the hackers don't reimburse users in full,". But he never kept that promise.

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Ian's first code commit was in the EOS project

Anonymity, which is common in cryptocurrencies, is not in itself evidence of wrongdoing. Thirteen years after Bitcoin's debut, the true identity of its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, remains unknown. And, even after the latest brutal sell-off, the "grandfather of cryptocurrencies" still has a market cap of $442 billion."Ian stated in an unpublished article:"

I just want to focus on building and creating value in what I believe is the best way to do things. I don't want to deal with too much criticism until my idea is fully marketed, and anonymity is an easy way to distance myself (and the protocols I work on) from this.

According to the records of the Discord server, Ian came to Solana in October 2020, but this was not his first code experiment. His GitHub commit history goes back more than a decade, and his first public cryptocurrency contribution was on an EOS project in late 2017."In early January 2021, Ian discussed the token economics of doomed stablecoins in Basis.Cash's Discord. there he started"obsessed

To build a decentralized currency."Along the way, he tried"Build a multi-protocol DeFi ecosystem"Moving to Solana was a way for me to start over."

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Who is the anonymous builder of Saber?"Who are these anonymous builders flocking to Saber? At last year's Solana conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Ian gave a presentation called"From zero to $2 billion"。

How Saber became the largest DeFi application on Solana was addressed in a panel discussion"Ian told Race Capital (Saber's largest venture capital backer):

We attracted some friends and were ready to build on Saber and grow the ecosystem."We can promote CASH and let more liquidity enter Saber,"He said.

He said.

In a brief interview with CoinDesk on Thursday, McCann said he was unaware of Ian's close relationship with Cashio.

"He always mentioned that there were other people who created it, but I don't know who the others are and I haven't met them."

"In an unpublished blog, Ian reveals the true origin of Cashio. As the code for 0xGhostchain, Ian is eager to complete a prototype of a Saber LP-backed stablecoin before Breakpoint, the largest developer gathering ever in the Solana ecosystem. Ian hopes others will replicate Cashio. Every protocol that relies on Saber LP tokens will become a liquidity vent, pouring more TVL into the $1.7 billion mothership."That's part of the reason the code is insecure, it's rushed for this deadline,

He wrote on March 26 that a hacker had previously duped Cashio’s unaudited smart contracts with fake collateral, costing it $52 million."Users on Cashio's Discord community may trust that CASH codes are safe. After all, Ian told them on November 23:"I personally reviewed". However, he told Crypto Twitter on March 23, the day the breach occurred."。

Both of these claims contradict what Ian wrote in his unpublished blog.

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"Moving on to Aptos"It has always been our goal to build projects using real names,

Ian wrote in an unpublished blog."On July 23, the brothers began using a"DAO Accelerator Program"Solicit external developers from Saber. Its application form includes:"

How will your protocol be deeply integrated with the Saber protocol to improve Saber's quantity/TVL/capital efficiency?"Ship Capital"。

The effort came at the same time as the brothers moved from Solana to the emerging blockchain Aptos, porting Saber to Aptos. Ian is betting on that, three sources said: They lead an Aptos-backed venture capital firm called Protagonist. its old name was

Seven Saber ecosystem users told CoinDesk they felt abandoned by the Ian brothers. Some CASH tokens lose money (previous stablecoins go to zero). Others said their cryptocurrencies were trapped in derivative tokens issued by Sunny. Anonymous user Brad_Garlic_Bread said he lost about $300,000 on Sunny and Saber — "There are a lot of people worse than me.""The community thinks Ian is running the show,"but no one knows the truth", said Brad_Garlic_Bread. He's still trying to get Ian's attention. On July 16, Brad asked Ian if"Can pretend to be Surya for a day

, to help Sunny Aggregator investors recover locked tokens. Ian skipped this question when answering the question on Saber Discord.

"Other SUNNY token holders asked Ian about future plans for yield aggregators: Saber is moving to Aptos, will Sunny do the same?"Ian said on July 16th:"Sunny's main developer lost most of his savings from the Cashio hack. He Will"encourage

The disenchanted developer rebuilt Sunny in Move (the Aptos development language), a coding language Ian says is safer than Solana's Rust, and can build multimillion-dollar protocols.