Founders of the DeFi company Opyn, Zubin Koticha and Alexis Gauba, have decided to leave the crypto industry after regulatory actions against the project by the CFTC.
Hey Crypto Twitter,
It’s been a while
This one’s a tough one…
After the regulatory action against Opyn, @alexisgauba and I have made the decision that we are leaving crypto.
This is honestly really emotional for me and Alexis.
— zubin koticha (@snarkyzk) November 14, 2023
In September the regulator fined Opyn $250,000 for unregistered trading of derivatives and operating without a license as a trading platform.
According to Koticha, he and his partner entered the industry in 2017.
«For the last six years we have been working on incredible things that would never be possible in TradFi, — innovations in the area of structured products and derivatives. We thought we would be involved in cryptocurrency for the rest of our lives. But, unfortunately and unexpectedly, this is the end of the road», — wrote he.
The project will continue to operate, and the post of CEO at Opyn, instead of Kotich, will be taken by the head of research Andrew Keone. The entrepreneur described the latter as an experienced engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Wall Street trader and “effectively the third co-founder” of the company.
According to the profile on Linkedin, Kotich was also co-founder of Mechanism Labs, which received a grant from DFINITY, and led research at ThunderCore. Gauba also participated in these projects.
In 2019 ThunderCore became the first participant in Huobi’s platform for initial exchange offerings (IEO) under the name Prime Lite.
As CFTC Chair Rostin Behnam stated that regulating DeFi protocols is advisable.