OpenEden's biz dev contractor was the founder of Braq — a community that's still wondering where its NFTs went

From theblock by Tim Copeland

In July, tokenized Treasury bill platform OpenEden engaged the services of Jerome Augustine, the founder of NFT fractionalization project Braq.

Augustine’s LinkedIn profile says he was the Head of Business Development and Partnerships, a title he used when appearing onstage at an event. A spokesperson for OpenEden said he was only a business development consultant and that he resigned from this position in late October “due to misalignment of expectations.” A source at OpenEden claims he is still present in the company’s Slack as of Nov. 8.

While working for OpenEden, members of the Braq community have continued to ask whether Augustine will ever make good on his promises to repay the expensive NFTs in the Braq community treasury that went mysteriously missing under his watch.

The disappearing NFTs

The Braq project got underway in November 2021, according to screenshots of Augustine’s previous LinkedIn profile. (His new profile, which appears to have been recently deleted or taken private, doesn’t name Braq but refers to a stealth startup instead.) It launched in early 2022, per its whitepaper, with a goal to take high-profile NFTs — like Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Doodles, Otherdeeds and Moonbirds — and fractionalize them into NFTs.

The original NFTs were fractionalized into 1,000 NFTs each representing 0.1% of the original, according to purchase agreements for two of the sales. Braq said it would custody the original NFTs and keep them separate from its own funds. It said the original NFT would be owned by all of the token holders, proportionally.

The high-value NFTs were kept secure in a two-of-three multisig, according to Nick Burns, who was closely involved with the project. This kind of multisig requires any two of the three key holders to sign a transaction for it to go through. Burns claims that Augustine controlled one of the keys, Augustine’s then-wife Anastasia Sacha controlled another and that he had the third key.

In July 2023, the project’s Mutant Ape NFT was moved out of the treasury and to  another wallet  where it would later be used to borrow other cryptocurrencies on NFT marketplace Blur. In October, an Otherdeed NFT was moved to the same wallet and later used to borrow more crypto on Blur. Before the end of the month, a Doodles NFT and a Moonbird NFT were also moved to the same wallet where they would be sold within weeks.

Onchain data  shows that the transactions were signed by Augustine’s wallet braqfrnds.eth and Sacha’s wallet bunnycakes.eth, but not by Burns’ wallet.

“As one of the three wallets in control of the vault’s multisig, I logged in to check what happened to make sure my wallet was not compromised,” Burns told The Block. “The other two wallets (braqfrnds.eth and bunnycakes.eth) signed to remove the NFTs contrary to the DAO legal structure. Jerome then deleted the legal documents from the BRAQ discord server and deleted the server logs showing this.”

Augustine eventually acknowledged the absence of the NFTs. In December, he told the Braq community in Discord that he was aware of the NFTs being sold off and had identified the people responsible. He claimed the developers who ran the token sale had access to his laptop, his private keys, his personal bank accounts and his crypto exchange accounts and that he had lost essentially everything he had. He said he was doing his best to recover the assets but that he would replace them either way.

Promising to make things right

From then on updates were sparse. In January 2024, Augustine said in the project’s Discord server that he intended to replace the lost assets and that he was trying to make things right. In June, he reiterated these comments and said he intended to refund the token sale proceeds and continue developing the project.

During this time, the Braq community remained skeptical. They asked for evidence of what he was saying and received little back.

“While we can't make definitive claims, the observations from records and visible facts, such as links tracing back to his wallet, deletion of whitepaper documents & erasing things from discord raise some concerns as a community member,”  wrote  a Braq community member called meru in Discord.

In May, Augustine joined crypto prime broker LTP where he worked for three months as a relationship manager before moving to OpenEden. In September, he represented OpenEden  onstage on a panel  about tokenization and real-world assets at a demo day organized by Iota. He then resigned the next month, according to the OpenEden spokesperson.

OpenEden's removal of Eugene Ng

In October, OpenEden fired its co-founder Eugene Ng following drink-spiking  accusations made on social media by a woman  in Hong Kong. Following the accusations, Ng deleted his X account and his LinkedIn profile.

Ng was also a founding partner of DWF Labs, a crypto trading firm that has a  long  and  controversial history . After the accusations broke, the trading firm fired Ng and  withdrew  the $10 million of USDT that it had deposited at OpenEden to generate yield. DWF Labs is closely tied to an options trading firm Darley Technologies, which is an investor in OpenEden through its investment arm Darley Labs.

We reached out to OpenEden for comment and asked for the request for comment to be forwarded to Augustine. We were unable to reach Augustine directly as his Braq email address bounced and his newer LinkedIn account was either taken private or deleted.