DOJ Scrutiny Intensifies Around Macalinao Brothers' Solana-Based Financial Projects

Federal investigators are zeroing in on the macalinao brothers—Ian and Dylan—who engineered Saber Labs, a prominent stablecoin exchange built on the Solana blockchain. According to sources close to the investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice is examining their involvement in a sprawling network of crypto ventures that artificially inflated key ecosystem metrics during crypto’s boom period.

The probe centers on how the macalinao brothers leveraged multiple pseudonymous identities to construct an interconnected web of financial protocols. These projects fed liquidity back and forth between themselves, allowing individual crypto deposits to be counted multiple times across different applications. The strategy effectively magnified total value locked (TVL)—a critical measurement for gauging DeFi protocol growth—by billions of dollars during 2021’s bull rally.

The TVL Gaming Mechanism Behind Solana’s Inflated Metrics

Ian Macalinao’s unpublished writings reveal the deliberate strategy. “The metric to optimize for in Summer 2021 was TVL,” he documented. “TVL can only count if protocols are built separately, so I devised a scheme to maximize Solana’s TVL: I would build protocols that stack on top of each other, such that a dollar could be counted several times.”

This mechanism allegedly amplified Solana’s perceived growth trajectory and potentially boosted the value of SOL, the network’s native token. Investigators are reportedly seeking detailed records on the entire ecosystem of projects orbiting around Saber, including Sunny Aggregator, a yield-farming application, and Cashio, a stablecoin platform that collapsed following a security breach costing millions.

A Fabricated Ecosystem: Anonymity as Cover

Ian authored code for both Sunny Aggregator and Cashio using anonymous personas, a tactic he justified through another excerpt: “If an ecosystem is all built by a few people, it does not look as authentic. I wanted to make it look like a lot of people were building on our protocol rather than ship 20+ disjoint programs as one person.”

This revelation prompted the data provider DefiLlama to overhaul how it calculates and presents TVL metrics industry-wide, acknowledging that the previous methodology had enabled such double-counting schemes.

Fallout and Current Status of the Ecosystem

Following CoinDesk’s public exposé in 2022, the macalinao brothers retreated from their ambitious expansion plans. They abandoned efforts to migrate Saber to the Aptos blockchain, exited their venture capital fund Protagonist VC, and transferred governance of several pseudonymously-managed projects to Marinade, a separate Solana-based protocol.

Today, Saber continues operating with modest activity—posting around $4.4 million in daily trading volume as of recent reports. However, the project’s Discord community has grown largely dormant. Meanwhile, Sunny and Cashio, whose tokens have stagnated, have essentially ceased functioning. Their Discord channels overflow with frustrated users demanding answers about developer whereabouts.

This case underscores how information asymmetries and metric-gaming tactics can distort ecosystem narratives. The macalinao brothers’ scheme demonstrates both the technical sophistication some developers employed to manipulate perception and the regulatory consequences now following such conduct.