Crypto community mourns death of Balancer Labs co-founder Crypto community mourns death of Balancer Labs co-founder
Crypto community describes the deceased as a visionary for his works in the crypto space.
1 min read
Updated: Nov. 2, 2022 at 3:08 pm UTC
Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
Blockchain developer Nikolai Muchgian drowned on a beach in Puerto Rico, local media reported.
According to the report, the 29-year-old died while swimming at the Condado beach, and his body has been recovered. He was a resident of San Juan until his demise.
Muchgian is the co-founder of Balancer Labs and worked on MakerDAO. He was also responsible for the DAI fork, RAI, and Rico, Beside his work as a DeFi developer, he was notably quiet, with little social media presence and commenting on several market developments.
He was also a philanthropist and notably donated more than $1 million to Carnegie Mellon University in 2020. Besides this, he was a fierce critic of self-styled CEOs, VCs, and CTOs in crypto, believing that they are even worse than the establishment
Tributes pour in
Several members of the crypto Twitter community have started paying tributes to the deceased, with many praising his works for the industry.
MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen tweeted thatย โNikolai was one of the only people in the early days of Ethereum and smart contracts who could predict the possibility of smart contract hacks and invented the security-oriented approach to smart contract design we know today. Maker would have been toast without him.โ
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson described the deceased as a โyoung and extremely bright man who had a very wide array of interests from game theory to urbit.โ
Impossible to overstate Nikolai's genius. It was obvious in everything he touched — a simple elegance. RIP.
— Charlie Noyes (@_charlienoyes) October 31, 2022
Nikolai was one of the most brilliant, eccentric, and sometimes difficult people Iโve ever had the pleasure of working closely with in the space. RIP to one of the goats โ๏ธโ๏ธโ๏ธ
— Mike McDonald (@mikeraymcdonald) October 31, 2022
Othersย acknowledged that Muchgian was a genius and visionary who contributed immensely to the DeFi space from its early days. In addition, several of those who worked with him in the early days of MakerDAO acknowledged his strong commitment to the truth.
Mentioned in this article
Author 
Oluwapelumi Adejumo
Oluwapelumi values Bitcoin's potential. He imparts insights on a range of topics like DeFi, hacks, mining and culture, underlining transformative power.
Featured Story
Advertise Here
In this article
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain platform that enables the creation of smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps).
Balancer
$2.40668
Balancer is a non-custodial portfolio manager, liquidity provider, and price sensor..
Maker
$1,584.29
Maker is a decentralized autonomous organization on the Ethereum blockchain seeking to minimize the price volatility of its own stable token โ the Dai โ against the IMFโs international currency basket SDR.
Cardano
$0.79103
Cardano is a decentralized public blockchain and cryptocurrency project and is fully open source.