The US Department of Justice is looking into a team of developers associated with the Solana-based protocol Saber. The developers are accused of falsifying identities and inflating Total Value Locked (TVL) statistics. TVL is a metric used to measure the overall health of a DeFi protocol.
Ian and Dylan Macalinao, the developers behind the Saber Labs, are being investigated. They are accused of allegedly creating a web of false identities and an ecosystem of interlocking financial products that double and triple counts crypto deposits by exchanging tokens within itself. The DOJ said falsification of identities created a tangled web of products within the ecosystem that boosted TVL for Solana by billions of dollars during the height of the crypto market’s bull run in 2021.
Investigation showed protocols that are stacked on top of each other to inflate TVL, this includes the yield-farming app Sunny Aggregator and stablecoin Cashio. At the time of writing this article, Solana (SOL) was up by 0.31% in the last 24 hours and trading at $16.11 – continues to see gains for holders.
