BadJ

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[Mr.RC｜𝟎𝐱𝐔 🅿️ @MrRyanChi]

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[BadJ @JiashuoLi]

@bimboyugari @albertcamslut Guys you’re totally encouraged to try Chinese social media. People are friendly in general and also curious about the foreign culture too 💕

[BadJ @JiashuoLi]

@cokezero07 @albertcamslut Let me explain this insider joke as a Chinese on the word “abandon”. It’s funny because it’s literally the first vocabulary on English Dictionary that we all have to memorise lol. And of course it makes sense here

[Huma @HumaCapital]

DWF Labs and Andrei Grachev: A History

DWF Labs, one year ago unknown to everyone in the crypto sphere, but now they are at the center of the crypto stage. They call themselves a market making and investment firm. Where did they suddenly come from? And who are the team members, among them founder Andrei Grachev? In this long-form post, I hope to lay before CT all the information gathered so far in an objective manner. Credits to @TobyFrei4, to whom this investigation was commissioned.

1) Grachev's History
Andrei Grachev appeared in the Russian crypto community around 2017. Prior to that, he worked in the logistics industry, far from the world of technology. He was the founder of several logistics companies, all of which are now closed. In the crypto community he introduced himself as a successful trader and partner at Crypsis Blockchain Holding (https://t.co/EYWaiPf7wH).

Further, Grachev appeared as the vice-president of RACIB in 2018. RACIB is a non-profit organization closely affiliated with a state-owned bank called VEB (Foreign Economic Bank), and their main goal was to promote crypto regulations in Russia. In 2019, Grachev became head of Huobi Russia. His partner at RACIB was Vladimir Demin, who also headed Huobi Russia after Grachev. Demin was also a high-ranking manager at VEB Ventures, the venture fund of a major Russian state bank. Demin and Grachev would later go on to co-found https://t.co/smYPdrHCNY (the predecessor of DWF Labs). More on this later.

Grachev also led a somewhat dubious project called https://t.co/tT8kyYkb7r, which intended to launch an ICO but had to cancel the idea due to the bear market in 2018. Some project investors reported that Grachev misappropriated around $157,000 of their investments. Andrei Grachev was the CEO of this organization, and Vladimir Perov was the CTO according to their LinkedIn profiles. Perov now also works at DWF Labs.

Moreover, according to the forklog article cited above, the owner of a company called DAS Index accused Grachev of not repaying him a debt of 10k back in 2019 when Grachev was already leading Huobi Russia.

2) https://t.co/smYPdrHCNY
Together, Demin and Grachev created an HFT trading firm called https://t.co/smYPdrHCNY. It is unclear what they were doing exactly and how big it was. They claimed to have volumes of 10-20 billion USD daily. Here is an AMA Grachev had about VRM (https://t.co/sX9MW5dBZw).

Here you can find their self-reported volumes at the time: https://t.co/OglcNL23mf.

This was the team at VRM (same source as above):

Zac Zou now also works at DWF Labs. Moreover, Zac Zou is the founder of HTR Trade. VRM was an investor in HTR Trade alongside a big Chinese VC called LDcapital.

The VRM team also created their own OTC desk called Black Ocean: https://t.co/XDFVWXrXES.

Here's a list of VRM's partners, among them LD Capital as well: https://t.co/kAj38ybJnk.

3) FLY (Franklin coin)
FLY was to be the native token of the Black Ocean exchange. The whitepaper can be found here: https://t.co/1LYfpV6yuh.

It can be seen that the token's price was down only from the start, and now sits at a $350k market cap: https://t.co/ciVpO1gfCy. Interestingly, their X and Medium accounts still seem to be 'active':
- https://t.co/te8TSJVRmB
- https://t.co/cG6wx6PSd7

4) DWF Labs
So, where did DWF Labs suddenly come from? It turns out that DWF is VRM rebranded. The last tweet of VRM Trade was on May 31st 2022, while the DWF Labs domain was registered on May 30th 2022: https://t.co/OjMpbGS8Ki. Was there a specific reason for the rebrand? That remains unknown.

On March 20th 2023, DWF Labs sent $7.5m in USDT to a wallet that has sent $163k to a wallet labelled as "AyeletNoff" on OpenSea: https://t.co/8nuxYXZB3c

Ayelet Noff is the founder and CEO of SlicedBrand, a PR agency:
- https://t.co/JUB1DIrX4r
- https://t.co/47ZxWL1BGv

Was this payment to get more media attention on DWF, or was it to help the projects DWF invested in with marketing? This remains open to speculation.

5) Conclusion
This concludes the investigation of the history of DWF Labs. We refrain from forming any opinion on these matters and hope to have brought this information objectively.

Credits to @nay_gmi for making this thread on DWF in April, which proved to be useful in our investigation: https://t.co/eROYoyHPOr

[BadJ @JiashuoLi]

@ICODrops @BitwavePlatform @hack_vc @blockchaincap @SignalFire @arca @PulsarPlatform @alumniventures You tagged the wrong Pulsar. It should be @PulsarTrading

[BadJ @JiashuoLi]

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