Alice in the land of mythos.
Frankly, the DeFi 2.0 business is still in the full exploratory phase. As you know, we are still at the beginning of decentralized finance and we are testing it.
As early adopters, we are a bit like guinea pigs or chemists in the laboratory. That's all that makes DeFi interesting and exciting, you'll tell me.
In short, the topic of the day is not so much the protocol itself as the developers behind it. (Even if we will come back to it in a future article on this question precisely because this affair gives rise to doubts…)
Wonderland is a bit the equivalent of the project OlympusDao on the Avalanche network. The Wonderland protocol token is TIME.
The TIME token is in free fall and investors are inevitably panicking, which makes the decline even worse.
For what? The market has been falling since the start of 2022 and TIME is only following the fall of others. This is what some people who are not very aware of the dramas of the crypto sphere will tell you.
Yet another new drama, you might say! Yes, and this one repeats an old story…
So, we wanted to talk to you about it…
Why are we talking about drama?
It's true that many altcoins have fallen over the past two weeks. It's not just the forks of Olympus that let's be clear.
However, tokens similar to Olympus took a big hit at the same time like TIME, ICE (Popsicle) or even SPELL (Abracadabra) and MIM for Abracada Money. These tokens have lost more than 80% of their value each…
Don't you see the commonality?
The point is Sestagalli, the developer behind Wonderland and these other tokens. Moreover, we find these tokens scattered across all protocols of this type.
With the advent of DeFi 2.0, you should know that Daniel Sestagalli has been considered a “genius” by many crypto holders.
As soon as he launched a protocol, all the people flocked to it in search of big gains. Which was the case. The first arrivals of these protocols gorged themselves, that’s a fact. You know the protocols of Sestagalli, marked by the DeFi 2.0 offer 4-digit APY rates…
However, the party was short-lived...
Why did the drama break out?
Do you like dramas?
So here's one.
Some say that this outrageous fall is actually due to a very specific reason. The anonymous co-founder of Wonderland known as "Sifu" has been "unmasked." It was a user on Twitter (by the name @zachxbt) who did his research and ended up revealing the person behind the Sifu handle.
We now know and thanks to him that it is Michael Patryn, one of the co-founders of the exchange platform QuadrigaCX.
And that’s not good at all….
In fact QuadrigaCX is actually a very bad memory in the world of cryptos….A bit like MtGox by the way.
The messed up story of QuadrigaCX
The QuadrigaCX exchange was launched in 2013 in Canada and quickly became a significant and market-leading exchange. Moreover, in 2018, the platform reached a transaction volume of $2 thousand. It was huge at that time, remember.
Only co-founder Cotten died during a trip to India from complications of a genetic disease, at the age of only 30.
The sad news was even more painful when users learned that he had access codes to the platform's wallets. Thus, he had the code (or half the code with his co-founder) of the wallet containing all of his clients' cryptos (i.e. more than $190 million at that time)... Another reminder that hurts even more, the market cryptos have exploded since then and these cryptos have been worth even more since then… We could only trade bitcoin, litecoin and Ethereum at that time…
In short, it caused quite a stir at the time. But really, all the media (even mainstream) were talking about it.
Users were enraged and some even thought it was a plot to get the developers to break the bank. Some very quickly suspected that Gérald Cotten had faked his death to get away with the kitty and live the life of an unsatisfied millionaire. All the same profiles in this kind of scam, indeed. Millions quickly and quickly a yacht…Zero originality.
Investigations were carried out, Cotten's wife was questioned etc. The judicial investigation concluded that he It was indeed a fraud. A Ponzi fraud...
The platform was shaky and the founders kept drawing money to satisfy their desires for a star lifestyle…
But the investigations taught us something even more juicy….
Police investigations revealed that Michael Patryn (one of the co-developers behind Wonderland) had left Quadriga two years earlier, in 2016.
In reality, this same name was a stage name borrowed by a certain Omar Dhanani, a convicted major criminal who was involved in various credit card and identity theft scams. He also spent several years in prison in the USA before moving to Canada.
So the drama broke out like this.
Last Thursday, the crypto community showed all its anger at Sestagalli because he had decided to continue working with this notorious scammer. The latter possessing the keys to the wallets and therefore the Wonderland protocols.
Unacceptable for those who have not digested the Quadriga affair and who have left a lot of money behind.
This naturally led to a massive sale of TIME and the tokens linked to these developers.
Since then, on January 27, a governance message announced that Sifu would be removed from the protocol's treasury management. The community voted 83% to replace Sifu….
Otherwise, since Wonderland as a project continues its journey, just as Sushiswap had continued its journey without any further disruption.
Still, the case raises crucial questions about the future of DeFi and anonymity. If you like to think about this kind of question, here are a few:
- Should we understand Sestagalli and affirm that a person who has made mistakes in his past may not make them again in the future?
- Does Sestagalli really have a professional conscience to put a man with such a background in charge of the treasury of the Wonderland project?
- Finally, with rogue developers, does that harm the protocols? challenge 2.0?
- Can we recycle the past on DeFi and maintain anonymity or are regulations necessary since with human beings, we know very well that there will always be crooks?
- Is anonymity an open door even to make scammers grow?
There you go, we will correct your copies and you have 4 hours 😉
We have resources to better understand this matter:
- The excellent article in frFrench Slate on the Quadraga affair
- The article in French from Vanity Fair on Gérald Cotten
- The story complete in English from Vanity Fair
- The film about Netflix which traces the history of Quadraga
Otherwise, we also made a short video on Wonderland (Time) if the subject interests you:
Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice. We strongly advise our readers to conduct their own independent research before committing to any investment.
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