Recently DeFi just had its first scandal of 2022, and no, it’s not a rug pull, flash loan exploit, or hack (That’s so 2020). It’s even more “Scandalous.” This one brings a “Crypto Ghost for the past.” Time Wonderland, a souled called DeFi 2.0 platform that is a fork of Olympus Dao on Avalanche, is one of the most popular protocols on the network has found itself on a bit of a pickle and not the financial one. It turns out that one of their co-founders, going by the name of 0XSifu was also the co-founder of one of the biggest scams in Canadian history. To add more to the story, the 0XSifu, also known as Michael Patyn, Omar Dhanani, or Omar Patryn, Is a convicted felon in the United States and known for many scams before Quadrigacx. You can read more about this here.
All of this has blown up in crypto media. Fortunately, mainstream media has not picked up this yet, but it is only a matter of time until they do and try to find other Anon founders who have committed some crime. As we continue with decentralization and unregulated terms and conditions in DeFi, this motto of hiding your face and identity while handling millions of dollars of digital assets brings something of defiance and rebellion to the digital movement. It’s almost a cool factor to some extent that our trust is on the smart contract and not a human. So who cares about identity, right? Why we would like to think that, it’s not the case at all. Smart contracts can be exploited, as we have seen in many instances and volatility and liquidation is also part of the equation. The fact is that until Ai (Artificial Intelligence) is to a flawless point, humans are a massive part of DeFi, so it begs the question when it comes to Annon founders: Who are we trusting? These are not easy questions since many people will have different answers. But if DeFi ever wants to replace the banking system, anonymous founders would have to fade away to create mainstream adoption. We may hate bankers, but at least we can see their faces and know that they have to follow some federal regulation to do business.
We are at the beginning of this, and who knows where this will take us. But unfortunately, we may get the first crypto villains that the media will not get enough of to portray a danger to this new technology. Some people may have different views about this, from the progressives to the libertarians, but if we look at the bigger picture, DeFi is a trust system. The trust is in code technology, among other things. But would we trust someone we don’t know their name or face to take care of our children or us? Would you trust an unknown person wearing a mask of an NFT with your life? Most of us would turn that offer, so it’s only normal for other non-crypto people not to trust founders that hide their faces and identity with their internet money. Time will tell what will happen, but this is only a bump in a long road ahead.
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