Nikolai Mushegian: The Tweet Before the Drowning

On 28 October 2022, Nikolai Mushegian posted a run of tweets from San Juan, Puerto Rico. The "CIA and Mossad and pedo elite are running some kind of sex trafficking entrapment blackmail ring" on the island, he wrote, and they were going to frame him. Hours later he was dead. His body was recovered off Ashford Beach in the Condado district, a stretch of San Juan coast known for rip currents. He was 29.

Mushegian was not a fringe figure. He had co-founded MakerDAO and built the first version of Dai, a stablecoin that by then held billions of dollars of other people's money. The combination of who he was and what he had just written turned his death into one of the most argued-over episodes in crypto.

What he built

Mushegian was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1993, the son of two life scientists who had emigrated from the Soviet Union. He studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, graduating in 2014, and went straight into crypto.

In 2015 he joined Rune Christensen, a Danish entrepreneur, as the first technical partner on MakerDAO. The project's product was Dai, a stablecoin: a digital token designed to stay worth one US dollar. Unlike most stablecoins, which hold real dollars in a bank, Dai is backed by crypto that borrowers lock up in smart contracts, pieces of code that hold and release money automatically. It works like a pawnshop run by software: deposit ether worth $150, borrow $100 of Dai, and if the ether falls too far the code sells it to cover the loan. Mushegian designed and built the original single-collateral version of Dai, which went live in December 2017. MakerDAO itself rebranded as Sky in 2024, but Dai still trades.

Through his consulting group DappHub he also helped build Wrapped Ether, a tool that lets ether be traded like any other token, and he co-wrote the 2019 white paper for Balancer, a trading protocol, with Fernando Martinelli. He left MakerDAO around 2018, reportedly unhappy that it was drifting toward banks and regulators. His later stablecoin designs, RAI and then RICO, tried to remove the human controls Maker had added.

At the end of 2019 he gave Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science MKR tokens, Maker's governance shares, worth about $1.4 million. The gift funded a research fund and a fellowship in his name. In 2021 he moved to Puerto Rico under Act 60, the island's tax incentive law that has drawn many crypto investors, and paid $2.2 million for a 288-acre plot of rainforest next to El Yunque National Forest, which he said he intended to give to the US Forest Service.

The weeks before

The tweets on 28 October were not the first sign that something had changed. In September he had posted that he had gone from being an anti-state crypto anarchist to praying for federal action against what he called an "illuminati roleplay" scheme. Rune Christensen told Decrypt he had spoken to Mushegian about three months before his death and found him in good spirits and excited about RICO, but worried about a criminal group he believed was interfering with his work.

His family has not made public statements about his state of mind, and no diagnosis has been reported. What is on the record is the sequence: increasingly alarmed posts, a specific accusation against intelligence agencies, and a death within hours.

The investigation

According to San Juan police records obtained by Decrypt, investigators found no indication of foul play. A preliminary examination found no signs of violence, apart from a small cut to his head. The police homicide division took the case, which is routine for drownings in Puerto Rico, and a formal autopsy was ordered.

In March 2023 a spokeswoman for Puerto Rico's Department of Justice told El Nuevo Día that the manner of death remained undetermined even after the autopsy report had been received. In January 2024, after almost a year and a half, El Nuevo Día reported that the department had concluded there was no criminal involvement in his death.

That did not settle it for everyone. Ameen Soleimani, a co-founder of Reflexer, the project behind RAI, tweeted after the death that his money was on Mushegian having been murdered. Others who knew him described it as a preventable tragedy, pointing to weeks of distressed posts. Neither view has any support in the official record beyond what the investigators said, which is that they found no crime.

What he left

In 2025 his parents completed the land gift he had promised. El Nuevo Día reported that they donated 297 cuerdas, about 288 acres, to El Yunque in his memory, which the local outlet Platea described as the largest private land donation in the forest's history. The Carnegie Mellon fund and fellowship continue in his name.

The Dai system he wrote is still running in updated form, and the questions about decentralisation he left MakerDAO over are still being argued. His death fits no tidy narrative. The authorities found no crime. His last public words claimed one. Between those two facts is a 29-year-old who had already given millions of dollars away.