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Sunny was the newest DeFi app to hit Solana last summer, during the blockchain’s bull run, when its native token increased fivefold. Sunny was only two weeks old in early September when billions of dollars in cryptocurrency poured into this yield farm.
Sunny Aggregator was built atop Saber by Ian Macalinao, Saber’s primary architect. Ian developed a web of interwoven DeFi protocols that projected billions of dollars of double-counted value onto the Saber ecosystem while coding as 11 ostensibly independent developers. As the network approached its zenith in November, Solana’s total value locked (TVL) briefly ascended.
Solana Network’s TVL at Its Peak
At its peak, Saber and Sunny accounted for $7.5 billion of Solana’s $10.5 billion TVL. According to DeFiLlama, the Solana network’s TVL continued to grow even after the Saber ecosystem began losing pace in mid-September 2021, peaking at $15 billion around November 9th, while Saber’s TVL had declined 64% by then.
Ian said that while he disliked this vanity statistic, it bothered him that Ethereum TVL was much higher than Solana’s. In his opinion, DeFi projects on Ethereum – the largest blockchain for DeFi – are “stacked” to double-count deposits.
In public, Ian and Dylan referred to their anonymous personas as “friends” or “friends of friends.” Ian said their “Ship Capital” programmer club was creating the blueprints for his perfect DeFi ecosystem. Everything was anchored by Saber and its so-called liquidity provider (LP) tokens.
When an ecosystem is developed entirely by a few people, it lacks authenticity. He intended to make it appear as if several individuals were working on their protocol rather than shipping 20+ disjointed programs as one.
Ian’s Anons And “Sybil Attack”
There are solid reasons to seek shelter behind a pseudonym. However, Ian’s weaponised “anons” carried out a “Sybil attack”, exploiting crypto users’ trust.
The Macalinaos released “Saber Public Goods” in May to spread the “Saber team’s” prolific code around Solana. There are eight of Ian’s eleven hidden projects there. There’s little disclosure about anons and their master. Sunny and Cashio, whose tokens disintegrated, didn’t appear.
Surya Khosla was Ian’s alias when he created Sunny Aggregator. Saint Eclectic, the Sunny sceptic, was hesitant to invest his LP tokens in the efforts of this enigmatic individual, an anon with an AI-generated face.
Surya benefited by one factor: the Ian puppet claimed to know Dylan quite well in real life. Dylan Macalinao tweeted last September 9th that he felt comfortable placing his cryptocurrency into Sunny Aggregator. Dylan explained, “We audited their code.”
Dylan provided Surya with the credibility to persuade doubters like Saint. The problem was that Surya Khosla, the primary developer, did not exist. Sunny Aggregator was built by Dylan’s brother Ian. Surya was a fictitious character invented by Ian. Ian’s initial foray into assumed identities for Saber was far from his last.
Ship Capital’s “friends” included 0xGhostchain, the creator of Cashio; Goki Rajesh, the creator of multi-signature wallet Goki; Swaglioni, the “grandmaster” of governance platform TribecaDAO; Larry Jarry from mining rewards aggregator Quarry; and Surya Khosla from Saber’s yield farm.
Understanding of Ian’s Actions
Ian, Dylan, and the puppet anons constantly supported Ship Capital’s efforts on social media. They promoted one other’s launches and integrations, applauded each other’s thinkfluencer tweets, and acknowledged each other for motivating them to develop on Solana. They even passed along Ian’s self-referential memes.
They occasionally waxed philosophical. When prominent Solana developer Armani Ferrante tweeted on December 29th, “If you’re not making errors, you’re too slow,” five Ian stooges answered in four minutes.
" An Ian Macalinao’s experiment quotes. Image: Twitter.
Others attempted to dance around the truth. “Team size =! Success,” Ian tweeted on December 7th, 2021. “I would gladly pay @larrinator01 and @0xGoki 10x market rate. They don’t need my money…”
When outsiders questioned Ian’s anons’ validity, they were sly. It’s hard to say whether Ian manipulated his anons’ Twitter accounts after his workbench. However, two persons who have worked with Ship Capital recall the crew’s strange conduct. After one identity checked out, another’s Telegram account would back up.
Decentralised Stablecoin Cashio’s CASH
Cashio’s CASH was introduced in November, near the zenith of the crypto market, as a decentralised stablecoin with dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies backed by “liquidity provider” tokens.
As collateral, Cashio exclusively accepted LP tokens from Saber. Last November, Saber, an “automatic market maker” with over $1 billion in TVL, was a key DeFi trading platform for stablecoin pairs on Solana. (The current TVL for Saber is $90.6 million.)
Cashio depends on Ian’s anons’ Saber ecosystem projects to provide yield. First, it used Crate under the alias “kiwipepper,” to wrap Saber LP tokens into “tokenised baskets.” These crates were routed through the Arrow yield redirection platform, which Ian created using “oliver code.”
Cashio also claimed that by staking these deposit derivatives in “Surya’s” Sunny Aggregator and Quarry—which Ian created under the alias “Larry Jarry” – it received yield. Cashio’s treasury, which a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) governed, received profits.
Their Saber LP tokens were accepted by Cashio’s DeFi machine, which then spat out CASH tokens. It was a successful business. CASH Holders might make 10%–30% profits by putting their LP-backed stablecoins into Sunny liquidity pools. One trader said they would only receive 5–10% if they placed their Saber LP tokens into Sunny instead of Cashio. The fact that the same digital asset-backed both was irrelevant.
$52 Million Hack To Cashio
The $52 million hack that caused Cashio to implode on March 23rd was a salvo at Ship Capital. Because he built the coding for Cashio, Ian pushed very hard for others to stake more into it. He expressed regret for their “catastrophic” loss in a protocol he developed under a false name and supported with his real name.
Ian pleaded with the hacker, a self-described Robin Hood figure railing against American and European fat cats, “to consider returning the funds”. Of the $39 million the victims of the breach requested, the hacker did eventually refund $14 million.
If the hacker didn’t reimburse users in full, Ian said he would try to compensate impacted personal users with his Saber and Sunny tokens. Although it won’t pay the entire amount, this is all he can provide. However, he never followed through on his unpublished promise.
“A Barrier For Criticism”
Pseudonymity is common in crypto, although it does not prove the crime. Thirteen years after the invention of bitcoin, the actual name of its developer, Satoshi Nakamoto, is still unknown. Despite a recent violent sell-off, the bellwether cryptocurrency has a market capitalisation of $442 billion. On the other hand, Ian wants to focus on providing value in his vision of what he feels is the ideal way to do things.
According to Discord server records, Ian’s entrance in Solanaland in October 2020 was not the self-proclaimed “shipooor’s” first code rodeo. His GitHub commit career spans more than a decade, beginning with the first public crypto contribution, on an EOS project, in late 2017.
In early January 2021, Ian explored the tokenomics of a doomed-to-depeg stablecoin in the Basis.Cash Discord. He became “obsessed” with creating decentralised money there. He attempted and failed to develop a multiprotocol DeFi ecosystem along the way, which resulted in “criticism and ridicule.”
"Cashio’s Discord server on Feb. 19. Image: Discord
The Macalinaos’s Next Move
Were these anonymous builders who were flocking to Saber? Ian pondered this at a panel discussion at last year’s Solana conference in Lisbon, Portugal, titled “From Zero to $2 Billion: How Saber Became the Biggest DeFi App on Solana.”
Sunny was one “friend’s” project; Crate, Ian’s pseudonym kiwipepper’s tokenised basket-making mechanism, was another. He said that one of those friends-of-friends created Cashio, a stablecoin project supported by Saber LP tokens that provided liquidity to Sunny Aggregator.
On July 23rd, the brothers launched a “DAO accelerator program” to entice other developers to Saber. “How would your protocol thoroughly integrate with the Saber Protocol, hence enhancing Saber’s volume/TVL/capital efficiency?” it asks on its application form.
That endeavour comes as the brothers leave Solana for Aptos, a new blockchain, bringing Saber with them. According to a venture fund source, several Solana developers are on the way. The Macalinaos are banking on it: they own a venture capital firm in Aptos. The protagonist is the name of their VC. It was once known as “Ship Capital.”
Users of the Seven Saber ecosystem said they felt abandoned by the Macalinao brothers. Some people lost money in CASH tokens (the erstwhile stablecoin went to zero), while others claim that their cryptocurrency is trapped in derivative tokens created by Sunny. Brad Garlic Bread, a pseudonymous user, stated he lost roughly $300,000 over Sunny and Saber.
Other SUNNY token holders enquired of Ian regarding the yield aggregator’s future. Saber is relocating to Aptos; will Sunny follow suit? They were curious about Sunny’s primary developer.