Original author: Crypto KOL Huma
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 was "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, the encryption KOL Huma conducted an investigation into the past information of DWF and its founder Andrei Grachev, and posted the results of the investigation 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 maker and investment firm. 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 all the information I have collected so far for the crypto community.
Grachev's experience
Andrei Grachev appeared in the Russian crypto community around 2017. Before that, he worked in the logistics industry, away from the tech world. He founded several logistics companies, but they are all closed now. In the crypto community, he introduces himself as a winning trader and partner of Crypsis Blockchain Holding.
Later, Grachev became the vice president of RACIB in 2018. RACIB is a non-profit organization closely associated with the Russian state-owned bank VEB (Venezuela), 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 was also a senior manager at VEB Ventures, a venture capital firm under 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 scheduled to conduct an ICO but had to cancel it due to the bear market in 2018. Some project investors reported that Grachev misappropriated their investment of about $157,000. According to LinkedIn profiles, Andrei Grachev is the CEO of this organization and Vladimir Perov is the CTO. 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 paying him a $10,000 debt while he was the leader of Huobi Russia.
VRM.trade
Demin and Grachev co-founded a high-frequency trading firm called VRM.trade, the exact business and size of which is unknown. They claim to have $10-20 billion in daily trading volume. Here is Grachev’s AMA on VRM.
Their self-reported trading volumes at the time can be found here .
Here is the VRM team:
Zac Zou is also working at DWF Labs now. In addition, Zac Zou is the founder of HTR Trade. VRM invested in HTR Trade together 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 whitepaper can be found here.
It can be seen that the price of the token has been falling since the beginning, and now has a market value of $350,000. Interestingly, their Twitter and Medium accounts still seem to be "active".
DWF Labs
Where did DWF Labs come from? It turns out that DWF is a rebrand of VRM. The last tweet from VRM Trade was on May 31, 2022, while the DWF Labs domain was registered on May 30, 2022. Was there any particular reason for the rebrand? That remains a 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 tagged “AyeletNoff” on OpenSea. Ayelet Noff is the founder and CEO of SlicedBrand, a public relations company.
It is unclear whether the payment was intended to gain DWF more media attention or to help market projects in which DWF has invested.
in conclusion
This concludes our background check on DWF Labs. We do not form any opinion on these issues and simply want to provide this information objectively. Thanks to Nay for his tweet about DWF in April, which was a great help in our investigation.
Original link