The Macalinao brothers, two prolific Cryptocurrency developers who used a web of secret identities to enhance their once-mighty Stablecoin exchange Saber and later pivoted to startup investing with a $100 million fund, have left their venture capital firm.
The fund confirmed to CoinDesk that Ian and Dylan, the original co-founders and general partners of Protagonist VC, are no longer connected with the fund or any of its affiliates. A spokesperson denied providing a departure date, however, stated that the brothers are not Protagonist investors. The brothers did not respond immediately to a request for comment on Thursday.
Their departure represents a 180-degree turn for a newcomer Crypto VC who has already begun to amass capital and a growing portfolio of Crypto startups. It has made significant investments in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) projects based on the Aptos Blockchain; the Macalinao brothers are regarded as influential by the developers of that emerging ecosystem.
The Macalinao brothers established themselves in the Solana Blockchain community. In early 2021, they launched Saber, a Decentralized exchange for trading Stablecoins that claimed to represent $4.15 billion (nearly half) of the Crypto value locked up on Solana at its peak. The interlocking DeFi lego bricks that surrounded Saber added to its allure: projects such as Sunny, Quarry, Cashio, Goki, and Tribeca.
As CoinDesk reported in August, Ian developed all of Saber’s ostensibly independent projects under various aliases in an attempt to drive more value into the Saber ecosystem. Ian described a “scheme” to double-count deposits using platforms built by anonymous profiles that were actually him in a never-published blog post after one of those projects imploded.
Those profiles were sometimes carried by the brothers’ “Ship Capital” developer collective. According to regulatory documents, Protagonist VC was originally known as Ship Capital.
