Nikolai Mushegian

Mushegian studied at Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry’s School of Computer Science, majoring in computer science with a minor in mathematics, and was a member of the school’s class of 2014; while there he developed a fascination with cryptography and decentralized systems.⁠[1][1]

Mushegian was a co-founder of MakerDAO, the first decentralized stablecoin project on Ethereum, and an early core developer of the Dai stablecoin. On February 6, 2018, he, Daniel Brockman, and Mikael Brockman published a draft of the Dai stablecoin “Purple Paper,” which used a Haskell program to write an executable technical specification of the Dai issuance system, serving as a reference implementation for the on-chain contracts written in Solidity.⁠[1][2][3][3][3]

In 2018, Mushegian left MakerDAO, reportedly dissatisfied with the project’s straying from its initial ideals of decentralization and opposition to government and traditional capital.⁠[4]

In 2019, Mushegian gave Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science MKR tokens valued at nearly $1.4 million, establishing the Mushegian Research Fund, the Mushegian Endowed Computer Science Fellowship, and a conference fund. As of 2025, the research fund supports Professor Elaine Shi’s cryptography and blockchain research group, and the fellowship supports graduate students in game theory and algorithm design.⁠[1][1][1][1]

On September 19, 2019, Mushegian and Fernando Martinelli published the Balancer white paper. It describes a Balancer pool as an automated market maker whose properties make it function as a self-balancing weighted portfolio and price sensor: liquidity providers collect fees from arbitrage traders, who rebalance the portfolio by trading on arbitrage opportunities.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5][5]

In 2021, Mushegian obtained a decree under Puerto Rico’s Act 60 and moved to San Juan.⁠[6][2]

Before his death, Mushegian was developing the decentralized stablecoin RICO, envisioned as a “spiritual successor” to Dai but designed “without compromises.” The ETH-backed stablecoin RAI was also heavily influenced by his design ideas. MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen said that when he spoke with Mushegian about three months before his death, Mushegian seemed happy to be building RICO but was worried about a criminal group he believed was trying to interfere with his work.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

On October 28, 2022, Mushegian posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the CIA, Israel’s Mossad and others were running a blackmail ring in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean and would frame and harm him. In the preceding months his posts had increasingly referred to government and criminal conspiracies.⁠[4][4][4]

Hours after the post, he was found dead in the waters of San Juan’s Condado neighborhood, his body recovered on Ashford Beach; he was 29, and his death was initially reported as a drowning. The beach is known for strong currents and rocks, and numerous swimmers, particularly tourists, have drowned there.⁠[4][4][4][2][6][4]

San Juan police records showed that, as of early November 2022, investigators had found no indication of foul play; a preliminary examination of the body found “no signs of violence,” apart from a small laceration to his skull. The Puerto Rico Police Bureau’s homicide division investigated, as is standard practice for all drowning deaths there, and an official cause of death awaited the autopsy results.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

As of April 2023, the Puerto Rico Department of Justice was still investigating Mushegian’s death, and how he died had not been determined.⁠[6]

After nearly a year of investigation, the Puerto Rico Department of Justice determined that Mushegian’s death did not involve a crime.⁠[7]

A few days before his death in October 2022, Mushegian told his family and the supervisor of El Yunque National Forest that he wished to donate his land to expand the rainforest’s protected area. In October 2025, his parents completed the donation, adding 297 cuerdas (a Puerto Rican unit of area) of land to El Yunque National Forest.⁠[8][8]