DWF and Andrei Grachev: A History

2023-10-04 11:07

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Original author: Crypto KOL Huma

Translation: 0x711 & Logicrw, BlockBeats

Recently, the cryptocurrency market maker DWF was ridiculed and excluded at a forum at Token 2049. Fellow company GSR publicly stated that DWF "is not qualified to be on the same stage as institutions such as Wintermute and OKX." Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy also expressed support for this statement.

On the other hand, in the secondary market, DWF's fierce style can be described as "infinite glory", and the CYBER battle has left countless retail investors with a "deep impression". DWF went from obscurity to fame within a year, and its background and origins seem to be little known. Based on this, crypto KOL Huma investigated DWF and its founder Andrei Grachev's past information, and published the investigation results on his social media platform. BlockBeats has translated and organized the content as follows.

Just a year ago, DWF was an unknown name in the encryption industry, but now they stand at the center of the encryption 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 for the encryption community.

Grachev's Experience

Andrei Grachev appeared in the Russian crypto community around 2017. Prior to this, he worked in the logistics industry, far from the world of technology. He founded several logistics companies, but they have all since gone bankrupt. In the crypto community, he introduced himself as a successful trader and partner at Crypsis Blockchain Holding, as reported.

Later, Grachev became the Vice President of RACIB in 2018. 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 cryptocurrency 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 (formerly known as DWF Labs).

Grachev also led a suspicious project called Export.online, which was originally planned for an ICO but had to be cancelled 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 forklog article cited earlier, 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.

You can find their self-reported trading volume at this location.

This is the team of VRM:

Zac Zou is now working at DWF Labs. In addition, Zac Zou is the founder of HTR Trade. VRM and a large Chinese venture capital firm, LDcapital, have invested in HTR Trade.

The VRM team has also created their own OTC trading platform, Black Ocean, as reported by Cointelegraph.

Here is the list of VRM's partners, which also includes LD Capital.

FLY (Franklin Coin)

FLY was originally the native token of the Black Ocean trading platform. The whitepaper can be found here.

You can see that the price of the token has been falling since the beginning, and its market value is now $350,000. Interestingly, their Twitter and Medium accounts still seem to be "active".

DWF Labs

Where did DWF Labs come from? It turns out that DWF is a renamed brand of VRM. The last tweet from VRM Trade was on May 31, 2022, while the domain for DWF Labs was registered on May 30, 2022. Is there a 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 US dollars to a wallet marked as "AyeletNoff" on OpenSea. Ayelet Noff is the founder and CEO of a public relations company called SlicedBrand.

This payment is made to help DWF gain more media attention or to assist in marketing DWF's investment projects. It is currently unclear.

Conclusion

The background investigation of DWF Labs ends here. We do not form any opinions on these issues and only hope to objectively provide this information. Thanks to Nay's tweet about DWF in April, which was of great help to our investigation.