Ousted Wonderland Treasury Manager Sifu Launches New Token, Names it After Himself

Sifu, the ousted treasury manager of DeFi protocol Wonderland, has launched a new token and named it after himself. On Feb 18, Sifu deployed around one million of the eponymous $Sifu token into a Uniswap V3 pool paired with ethereum (ETH).

Sifu was booted out of Wonderland following his identification last month as Michael Patryn, co-founder of failed Canadian crypto-asset exchange Quadriga. A former convict who did time for bank fraud in the United States, Sifu has not been accused of wrongdoing at Wonderland.

According to Etherscan, there are currently 183 holders of $Sifu outside of the Uniswap V3 pool. An address that has been linked to Sifu, sifu.eth, holds 49,500 of the token, or 4.95% of the total supply.

One user spent nearly $500,000 to buy 4,835 Sifu tokens a few days ago and has about 0.48% of the total supply. An address associated with Zachxbt, the pseudonymous on-chain sleuth that exposed Sifu, appears to have paid about $1,000 buying 10 Sifu tokens.

“He [Zachxbt] knows a good deal when he sees it,” Sifu joked of his nemisis’ curious purchase, in a tweet.

Details about the purpose or function of the token remain unclear. At the time of writing, the token was trading at $104.19, up 20% over the previous 24 hours on thin volume. At this price, the total value of Sifu’s existing holdings of the token amount to $5.15 million.

Users are basically exchanging their ETH for $Sifu. That is because Sifu did not deposit any ethereum when he provided liquidity for his token to the Uniswap V3 pool. When asked on Twitter what project he was working on, Sifu replied: “$Sifu.”

It may be that Sifu has moved on to other things after he was voted out of his own project at Wonderland, a DeFi protocol he co-founded with Daniele Sestagalli, the renowned developer criticized for protecting Sifu’s identity. He turned down a proposal to rejoin Wonderland.

Sifu challenged people that continuously bring up his fraudulent past to “provide evidence of my guilt” at Wonderland. The crypto millionaire believes that he has “paid his debt to society” and moved on from his past deeds “a long time ago”.

Recently, Sifu started to cash out his multi-million-dollar ETH stash through cryptocurrency mixing service Tornado Cash, making it harder to trace. Sifu said he used Tornado Cash for “privacy,” contrary to suggestions that he was doing it to wash “stolen” funds.