The investigation follows previous CoinDesk exposés in August that revealed that the Macalinao brothers created a bogus decentralized financial ecosystem by passing triple-counted deposits between them. The allegedly fraudulent scheme was intended to increase a key metric for the Solana cryptocurrency in 2021.
US authorities are investigating a network of crypto projects circulating on Sabre, according to CoinDesk, including a De-Fi yield farming app, Sunny Aggregator, and a stablecoin project, Cashio, which lost millions of dollars in a hack in March. past.
The DOJ and Saber Labs did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
“The metric to optimize for in the summer of 2021 was [total value locked (TVL)]wrote Ian Macalinao in an unpublished blog discovered by CoinDesk.
“TVL can only count if the protocols are built separately, so I devised a scheme to maximize Solana’s TVL: I would build protocols that stack on top of each other, so that a dollar could be counted multiple times,” he added.
Meanwhile, Saber continues to maintain operations. According to his website, he processed $4.3 million in trading volume in the last 24 hours.
The crypto industry is facing upheaval and scrutiny following the November collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, which has since led to a series of money laundering and conspiracy charges.
