Wonderland Community Votes Out “Sifu” – Might Wind Down Next
Wonderland community has voted to remove Sifu as its treasury manager two days after the revelation that Sifu is Michael Patryn, the convicted co-founder of the failed Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX.
DeFi protocol Wonderland DAO opened a vote to remove the treasury manager Sifu on January 27 and passed it on January 29 with 87.56% in favor and 12.44% against. The native token of Wonderland TIME holders with a combined over 64,000 tokens participated in the vote. (One token generally serves as one vote).
The revelation of Sifu’s real identity was made through Twitter account zachxbt, who posted a snapshot of a conversation with Daniele Sestagalli — the other co-founder of Wonderland — saying that Sifu is Patryn.
1/ This needs to be shared @0xSifu is the Co-founder of QuadrigaCX, Michael Patryn. If you are unfamiliar that is the Canadian exchange that collapsed in 2019 after the founder Gerald Cotten disappeared with $169m
It appears that Sestagalli only found out Sifu’s real identity about month ago, when the two met face-to-face the first time. Sestagalli and Sifu launched Wonderland in September of last year.
Wonderland is one of the most popular and most successful Olympus DAO forks. It was the first decentralized reserve currency protocol available on Avalanche, letting users deposit or sell tokens to the Olympus treasury in return for discounted OHM tokens. Wonderland quickly became a famous fork of Olympus. The current treasury balance of Wonderland stands at over $716 million, according to its website.
According to Sestagalli, he decided not to judge Sifu by his past. Sifu is a convicted financial criminal who spent time in jail. He also pled guilty to conspiracy to commit credit and bank card fraud in 2005 and burglary, grand larceny, and computer fraud in 2007.
He founded QuadrigaCX in 2013 with Gerald Cotten, who passed away unexpectedly and mysteriously in 2018 after a trip to India. Cotten’s death caused over $130 million in losses for 76,000 investors as the exchange was found to be largely devoid of assets.
What’s next for Wonderland?
Wonderland community has ticked a box in regards a vote to remove Sifu as Wonderland’s treasury. What follows next is another poll on whether to close down Wonderland or not.
“Winding down will mean giving every wMEMO holder back the funds from the treasury that they are entitled to and declare the OHM Fork experiment closed. We strongly believe that this would be the cleanest way of moving forward.”
The new vote is currently on-going and will end at 1PM 31 January.
If Wonderland decides not to wind down, the DAO will identify a new entity to give the control of the treasury. However, the DAO expects the community to submit a counter-proposal within five days, recommending relevant people willing to take over the multi-sig and take on the project.
If no counter-proposal is made, Wonderland will unwind the treasury.
“We don’t want anything to happen to users’ funds, and we would not feel confident to delegate the whole treasury to a non-structured replacement.”
Wonderland believes unwinding the treasury is the best solution. To that end, it is already getting a user interface ready for the community to claim its funds back.
