"We do not form any opinion on these issues and only wish to provide this information objectively."
Original author: Crypto KOL Huma
Original source: Twitter@HumaCapital
Original translation: 0x711 & Logicrw, BlockBeats
A few days ago, the crypto market maker DWF was ridiculed and ostracized by the crowd at a Token 2049 forum. Fellow GSR publicly stated that DWF "is not qualified to be on the same stage as Wintermute, OKX and other institutions." Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy also expressed support for this statement.
On the other hand, in the secondary market, DWF's fierce style can be described as "unlimited glory", and the CYBER battle has made countless retail investors "unforgettable". DWF went from obscurity to household name within a year, and few people seem to know its background and origins. Based on this, crypto KOL Huma conducted an investigation into the past information of DWF and its founder Andrei Grachev, and published its findings on its social platform. BlockBeats translated and summarized it as follows:
Just a year ago, DWF was an unknown name in the crypto space, but now they are at the center of the crypto world. They call themselves a market making and investment company. Where did they come from? Who are the team members and who is the founder Andrei Grachev? In this long article I hope to present to the crypto community all the information I have gathered so far.
Grachev’s experience
Andrei Grachev emerged in the Russian crypto community around 2017. Before that, he worked in the logistics industry, away from the world of technology. He founded several logistics companies, all of which have now collapsed. In the crypto community, he introduces himself as a winning trader and partner at Crypsis Blockchain Holding.
Grachev later became RACIB's Vice President in 2018. RACIB is a non-profit organization closely affiliated with Russia’s state-owned bank VEB (Veibank), and their main goal is to promote crypto regulations in Russia. In 2019, Grachev became the head of Huobi Russia. His partner at RACIB was Vladimir Demin, who also led Huobi Russia after Grachev. Demin is also a senior manager at VEB Ventures, a subsidiary of VEB. Demin and Grachev later co-founded VRM.trade (the predecessor of DWF Labs).
Grachev also led a dubious project called Export.online, which was originally scheduled to conduct an ICO but had to be canceled due to the bear market in 2018. Some project investors reported that Grachev misappropriated approximately $157,000 of their investments. According to LinkedIn profiles, Andrei Grachev is the CEO of this organization and Vladimir Perov is the Chief Technology Officer. Perov now also works at DWF Labs.
Additionally, according to the forklog article cited above, the owner of a company called DAS Index accused Grachev of not repaying his $10,000 debt while leading Huobi Russia.
VRM.trade
Demin and Grachev co-founded a high-frequency trading company called VRM.trade, the exact business and size of which are unknown. They claim a daily trading volume of $10-20 billion. Here's Grachev 's AMA on VRM .
Their self-reported trading volumes at that time can be found here .
This is the VRM team:
Zac Zou now also works at DWF Labs. Additionally, Zac Zou is the founder of HTR Trade. VRM invested in HTR Trade along with LDcapital, a large Chinese venture capital firm.
The VRM team also created their own OTC trading platform, Black Ocean .
Here is a list of VRM's partners , which also includes LD Capital.
FLY (Franklin Coin)
FLY was originally planned to be the native token of the Black Ocean trading platform. The white paper can be found here .
You can see that the price of the token has been falling since the beginning and now has a market cap of $350,000. Interestingly, their Twitter and Medium accounts appear to still be "active."
DWF Labs
Where did DWF Labs come from? It turns out that DWF is a rebrand of VRM. VRM Trade’s last tweet was on May 31, 2022, and DWF Labs’ domain name was registered on May 30, 2022. Is there any particular reason for rebranding? This remains an unsolved mystery.
On March 20, 2023, DWF Labs sent $7.5 million in USDT to a wallet that had previously sent $163,000 to a wallet marked "AyeletNoff" on OpenSea. Ayelet Noff is the founder and CEO of SlicedBrand, a public relations firm.
Is this payment to get DWF more media attention, or to help market DWF-invested projects? It's not clear yet.
in conclusion
This concludes the background check for DWF Labs. We do not form any opinion on these matters and wish only to provide this information objectively. Thanks to Nay's tweet about DWF in April, which was of great help to our investigation.
