Author: Crypto KOL Huma Translation: 0x711 & Logicrw, BlockBeats
Recently, the crypto market maker DWF was mocked and excluded at a forum during Token 2049. The peer company GSR publicly stated that DWF “is 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 aggressive style can be described as “infinite glory”. The CYBER battle has left a lasting impression on countless retail investors. Within a year, DWF has gone from obscurity to well-known, and its background and origins seem to be little known. Based on this, crypto KOL Huma has investigated DWF and its founder Andrei Grachev’s past information and published the investigation results on their social media platform. BlockBeats has translated and organized them as follows.
Just a year ago, DWF was an unknown name in the crypto field, but now they are standing at the center of the crypto world. They describe themselves as a market-making and investment company. Where did they come from? Who are the team members, and who is the founder Andrei Grachev? In this lengthy article, I hope to present all the information currently collected to the crypto community.
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Grachev’s Experience
Andrei Grachev appeared in the Russian crypto community around 2017. Before that, he worked in the logistics industry, far away from the tech world. He founded several logistics companies, but they have all since closed down. In the crypto community, he introduced himself as a successful trader and partner at Crypsis Blockchain Holding.
Later, in 2018, Grachev became the Vice President of RACIB. RACIB is a non-profit organization closely associated with the Russian state-owned bank VEB (Foreign Economic Bank), 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 later also led Huobi Russia after Grachev. Demin is 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 suspicious project called Export.online, which was originally planned for an ICO but had to be canceled due to the bear market in 2018. Some project investors reported that Grachev misappropriated their investment of about $157,000. According to LinkedIn, Andrei Grachev is the CEO of this organization, and Vladimir Perov is the CTO. Perov now also works at DWF Labs.
In addition, according to the previously mentioned Forklog article, the owner of a company called DAS Index accused Grachev of not repaying his $10,000 debt while serving as the leader of Huobi Russia.
VRM.trade
Demin and Grachev jointly created a high-frequency trading company called VRM.trade, and the exact business and scale are not yet clear. They claim to have a daily trading volume of 10-20 billion US dollars. Here is Grachev’s AMA about VRM.
Here you can find their reported trading volume at that time.
This is the VRM team:
Zac Zou is now working at DWF Labs. In addition, Zac Zou is the founder of HTR Trade. VRM invested in HTR Trade together with a large Chinese venture capital company LDcapital.
The VRM team also created their own OTC trading platform, Black Ocean.
Here is the list of VRM’s partners, which also includes LD Capital.
FLY (Franklin Coin)
FLY was originally intended 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 this token has been falling since the beginning, and its current market value is $350,000. Interestingly, their Twitter and Medium accounts still seem to be “active”.
DWF Labs
Where does DWF Labs come from? It turns out that DWF is a rebranded brand of VRM. The last tweet from VRM Trade was on May 31, 2022, while the domain name of DWF Labs was registered on May 30, 2022. Is there any special reason for the rebranding? This is still a mystery.
On March 20, 2023, DWF Labs sent $7.5 million USDT to a wallet, which had previously sent $163,000 to a wallet marked as “AyeletNoff” on OpenSea. Ayelet Noff is the founder and CEO of a PR company called SlicedBrand.
Was this payment for DWF to gain more media attention or to help market the projects DWF invested in? It is still unclear.
Conclusion
This concludes the background investigation of DWF Labs. We do not form any opinions on these issues, but only hope to provide this information objectively. Thanks to Nay for the tweet about DWF in April, which has been of great help to our investigation.
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