- Ian’s ploy worked for a while. By his count, Saber and Sunny comprised $7.5 billion of Solana’s $10.5 billion TVL at their peak. (Billions of those dollars were double-counted between his two protocols.)
“I believe it contributed to the dramatic rise of SOL,” Ian wrote of a time when Solana’s native currency traded at $188.
Solana network’s TVL continued to swell even after the Saber ecosystem began losing steam in mid-September 2021, topping at $15 billion around Nov. 9, according to data provider DeFiLlama, while Saber’s TVL had by then dropped 64%.
Ian wrote he disdained this “vanity metric”; nonetheless, “it bothered me that Ethereum TVL was so much higher” than Solana’s, because in his view, DeFi projects on Ethereum – the largest blockchain for DeFi – are “stacked” to double-count deposits.
“I wanted to create a system very similar to this,” he wrote. One problem: “If the same team built each protocol, TVL would be more silly as a metric. Thus I created more anonymous profiles,” he wrote.
Ian wore 11 masks.