“Who is killing the crypto millionaires?” asks Michael Snyder on his blog The Economic Collapse. “It is often said that two is a coincidence, but three is a trend.”
The recent untimely deaths of three cryptocurrency moguls prompted Snyder’s question. He noted that “these deaths have happened at a time when the cryptocurrency community is going through an unprecedented amount of turmoil. The collapse of FTX is threatening the legitimacy of the entire industry, and many that were once crypto millionaires on paper have had their fortunes completely wiped out.”
The most recently deceased is Russian billionaire Vyacheslav Taran, age 53, co-founder of cryptocurrency trading and investing platform Libertex. He died in a helicopter crash on November 25. “The finance titan was flying with an experienced pilot, 35, from [Lausanne, Switzerland] on the shores of Lake Geneva after another passenger allegedly cancelled last minute,” reports the U.K.’s Metro. The outlet could not identify the name of the other passenger.
At 30 years of age, Tiantian Kullander died in his sleep just two days earlier, on November 23. He was co-founder of the Hong Kong-based digital asset company Amber Group, and he leaves behind a wife and young son.
On October 28, the body of Nikolai Mushegian, 29-year-old stablecoin innovator, was found on a beach in Puerto Rico. Mere hours beforehand he had tweeted that he believed the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and Israel’s Mossad were planning to murder him.
“CIA and Mossad and pedo elite are running some kind of sex trafficking entrapment blackmail ring out of Puerto Rico and caribbean islands,” reads the 3:57 a.m. tweet. “They are going to frame me with a laptop planted by my ex gf who was a spy. They will torture me to death.”
The New York Post relates that after sending that tweet, Mushegian “left his $6 million beach house in the luxe Condado area of San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a walk. A little after 9 a.m., a surfer off Ashford Beach, a spot considered so rife with riptides that local hotels warn against ocean swimming, discovered Mushegian’s body in the waves. He was wearing his clothes and had his wallet on him,” according to sources.
In an earlier tweet in September, Mushegian had also speculated that he would be “suicided by CIA.”
The Post quotes various people who were close to Mushegian, but no consensus among them as to cause of death. Some speculate accident, others suicide, still others foul play. Police investigating the case do not consider it to be a homicide.
“But Brock Pierce, the ‘Mighty Ducks’ child star-turned-cryptocurrency billionaire who pioneered the mass move of cryptocurrency czars to Puerto Rico when he relocated there in 2017, knew Mushegian and believes the death was simply a tragedy that may never be solved,” relates the Post.
(Interestingly, Pierce is heavily featured in an exposé published by Revolver News. He became embroiled in a sex-abuse lawsuit in the late 1990s and later maintained connections with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In 2014 he also co-founded cryptocurrency company Tether, now the third largest in the world, which markets a stablecoin by the same name. Tether has been riddled with fraud scandals in recent years.)
Despite the extremely odd timing of the three deaths, major media scoff at speculation that it terms “conspiracy theory.” Their characteristic “nothing to see here” attitude inspires as much confidence as usual.
