The Macalinaos wanted other crypto protocols to become so dependent on Saber that “its failure would lead to the entire system going down,” as Dylan phrased it on Oct. 1, 2021. “Btw this is the 200 IQ [Saber Labs] strategy, but few understand…”

Ramming deposits from Saber-to-Cashio-to-Crate-to-Arrow-to-Sunny-or-Quarry had even bigger implications for Saber. According to Ian, it turned $1 of apparent TVL into $6. Many DeFi projects measure their worth by touting total user deposits: TVL.

“TVL can only count if protocols are built separately,” Ian wrote, explaining why his anons’ protocols appeared to be separately built.

In the unpublished post, Ian begged the hacker – a self-styled Robin Hood-type who railed against American and European fat cats – “to consider returning the funds.” The hacker later did return $14 million of the $39 million that hack victims requested.

Ian wrote that if the hacker didn’t pay users back in full, “I will do what I can to repay affected personal users in my personal Saber and Sunny tokens. This won’t cover the full amount, but it’s all I have to offer.” He never made good on that unpublished pledge.

“The main sunny dev got burned out after losing most of their savings from the Cashio hack,” Ian said on July 16. He said he would “encourage” this disenchanted dev to rebuild Sunny in Move, a coding language Ian says is safer than Solana’s Rust for building multi-million-dollar protocols.