• Nikolai Mushegian, co-founder of Balancer Labs, has reportedly passed away in Puerto Rico.
• His body has been recovered, but no other details were shared
• Mushegian tweeted before his death that the CIA and Mossad would frame him.

It has come to light that Nikolai Mushegian, co-founder of Balancer Labs and creator of MakerDAO, has been reported dead in Puerto Rico. According to local reports, the 29-year-old died of drowning. Per sources, Mushegian was swimming at the Condado beach when he was swept away by currents and disappeared.

Not much information has been revealed except that Mushegian’s body was recovered.  Mushegian is the co-founder of Balancer Labs and has also contributed to a fork of the DAI stablecoin. However, he did not have a significant online presence.

What’s intriguing about the incident is that Mushegian published a tweet just hours before he passed away. According to his last words, “CIA and Mossad and pedo elite” planned to frame him and torture him to death. He claimed that these organizations were part of a sex trafficking entrapment blackmail ring and that his ex-girlfriend had hidden a laptop with incriminating evidence on it so that they could frame him at will.

The crypto community did not shy away from speculating over this, with many observers referring to his last tweet and some others he posted prior to that. One of his previous tweets even suggested that he may be “suicided by CIA” or become a “CIA brain damage slave asset.”

Several prominent figures in the cryptocurrency industry, such as Ava Labs’ founder and CEO Emin Gün Sirer, have expressed their grief at the news. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson said:

I knew Nikolai from back in the Bitshares days. He was a very young and extremely bright man who had a very wide array of interests from game theory to urbit. I believe he went to CMU and had a deep understanding of technology. Sad to see what happened.

Even while he was not active on social media, Mushegian has played his part in philanthropy. In 2020, during the height of the Covid 19 epidemic, he contributed $1.3 million in cryptocurrencies to his alma mater Carnegie Mellon to fund a research program for decentralized technologies.