MakerDAO co-founder Nikolai Mushegian dies at 29 in Puerto Rico

MakerDAO co-founder Nikolai Mushegian

A brilliant young cryptocurrency pioneer named Nikolai Mushegian tweeted on Oct. 28 that intelligence agencies were going to murder him and was found dead on a Puerto Rico beach hours later.

“CIA and Mossad and pedo elite are running some kind of sex trafficking entrapment blackmail ring out of Puerto Rico and Caribbean islands,” Mushegian, a developer of blockchain-based decentralized finance platforms who wanted to end global banking corruption, tweeted at 4:57 a.m. “They are going to frame me with a laptop planted by my ex [girlfriend] who was a spy. They will torture me to death.”

The 29-year-old then left his $6 million beach house in the luxe Condado area of San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a walk. A little after 9 a.m., a surfer off Ashford Beach, a spot considered so rife with riptides that local hotels warn against ocean swimming, discovered Mushegian’s body in the waves. He was wearing his clothes and had his wallet on him.

News of Mushegian’s death, coupled with his last tweet and other, dark, posts about fighting “evil” people who were part of the “central banking cartel” which he claimed, used “debt and blackmail” as weapons have fueled conspiracy theories online and in the tight-knit cryptocurrency community in Puerto Rico.

“So Nikolai is still F–KING DEAD,” Ameen Soleimani, the CEO of Spankchain, tweeted Oct. 3. “My money is on him being murdered. He was found drowned 4 hours after his riskiest tweet ever. He had all year to drown randomly or be mugged, so it seems unlikely that his death was unrelated to his tweet…”

“Mushegian … tweets 4 days ago about CIA, Mossad and pedo elites and fearing for his life … Found dead yesterday … Pedo elites are real … why Epstein suicided himself,” wrote Smoky Bear.

In September, Mushegian tweeted that there were “3 possible futures for me 1) suicided by CIA 2) CIA brain damage slave asset 3) worst nightmare of people who f–ked with me up until now, I am sure these are the only options.”

Mushegian was an early developer of Maker DAO, the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol and was a key architect of stablecoin systems— currencies without government backing.

A person who knew Mushegian very well for years until they had a falling-out two years ago said that the developer was “very very smart” but also suffered from extreme bouts of paranoia.

“He had mental problems,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He saw a psychiatrist at times. He smoked a lot of pot. A tremendous amount.”

At the same time, the source said Meshugian was in communication with federal agencies, possibly including the CIA, but did not elaborate further.

“Some of his paranoia was based on fact,” the source said. “He’d discover things. He knew things. Nikolai got bored a lot with the mundane of life. He’d go after things, constantly putting himself in weird positions. It wasn’t for the money. He was interested in why things were the way they were and the corruption behind it.”

The source described Mushegian as a loner who lived alone with his dog, Sunny, after a bad breakup with the girlfriend he called a “spy” in his last tweet.

Another source said there is “no way” the ex-girlfriend was a spy.

“He was a very quirky guy,” the source added of Mushegian. “He and I spent a lot of time together and I knew everything about him. He came across as cocky and arrogant but that was just his autism. He was a big nerd but he wouldn’t let anyone bully him. He had a collection of guns long guns, handguns, rifles. He liked guns and he knew he wanted to protect himself. Maybe he knew too much or he was going to expose someone. He said exactly what was on his mind. He had no filter.”

But Brock Pierce, the “Mighty Ducks” child star-turned-cryptocurrency billionaire who pioneered the mass move of cryptocurrency czars to Puerto Rico when he relocated there in 2017, knew Mushegian and believes the death was simply a tragedy that may never be solved.

Pierce told that he and others in the community were initially very “confused” about what may have happened to Mushegian when they first heard about his death.

Then, after speaking with Mushegian’s Midwestern-based family and others at the funeral in San Juan, he said he came to believe the drowning was neither accidental nor the result of foul play — hinting that it was self-inflicted. Several sources said that Mushegian had been in such a “downward spiral” in recent weeks that his father had come to stay with him at his Condado home.

San Juan police told The Post that Mushegian’s death is still under investigation but is not considered a homicide at present.

“His mother clarified that his death had nothing to do with his [conspiracy] tweets,” Pierce said. “He was a beautiful man and a child at heart. He was also an incredible visionary, I don’t call people brilliant very often but Nikolai was brilliant. And brilliant people sometimes walk the edge of insanity.”

Pierce told Tuesday that Meshugian’s parents said he had been sober for the past six months and might have misjudged the beach surf and have gotten accidentally swept up into the waves.

Cryptocurrency investor Michael Terpin, who was among the first wave of tech entrepreneurs to move to Puerto Rico even before Pierce, said he knew Mushegian and worked with him.

“He was a brilliant guy and I wouldn’t call him a tinfoil-hat kind of person at all,” Terpin told The Post. “This is right out of an episode of ‘The Blacklist.’ I know Nikolai liked to go meditate in the morning but I didn’t know him to be the type to go out swimming like that, especially in such rough water. I don’t see any way this could have been an accident.”

Another friend in Puerto Rico who spoke on condition of anonymity said many feared Mushegian committed suicide.

“He had stopped talking to people and gotten very reclusive,” the friend told The Post. “I think his mental health was getting worse and he wasn’t asking for help. He had closed himself off. I think, unfortunately, that his [last] tweet was a really bold way of bringing significance to a suicide. Like, ‘How can I bring some nobility and meaning to my death?'”

Mushegian, apart from his darkest tweets, had long positioned himself as someone helping bring a purer form of banking and finance to the world.

“Nikolai was working toward an incorruptible world and he wanted there to be a separation of banking and the state, just as there is a separation of church and state,” Pierce said. “He felt the world would be better off if central banks couldn’t print money and finance wars.”

Mushegian, a 2014 Carnegie Mellon graduate who donated $1.4 million to the school, often referenced the late Terry A. Davis, once called “God’s Lonely Programmer,” in his writings, as well as on his LinkedIn profile and website — sometimes even using Davis’ name as his own handle. Davis — who created and designed a complex entire operating system, Temple OS, by himself — had a small cult following but also suffered from serious mental health issues including schizophrenia.

Davis died in Aug. 2018 at age 48 after being struck and killed by a train in The Dalles, Oregon. 

The train engineer considered it a suicide, according to a police report.

 “There was someone named Terry Davis,” Mushegian wrote in March. “Terry understood that the way big software companies made software was harmful to regular people. But he did not understand how to explain it to the people it was harming. 

To make sure he could never explain it in a way that people could understand, the people who wanted to create harmful software on purpose caused him to harm himself in ways he didn’t understand.”

Brock Pierce, who ran for president in 2020, told he had never heard of Terry Davis but was adamant that Mushegian’s death was not at the hands of sinister forces.

“Intelligence agencies are not hunting down crypto pioneers,” he said. “If the government were knocking off people in this field, I would know.”