Now Hoffman is ready to add his name to the title of anonymous founder and the “worst day of his life” story. This story began when he woke up one morning to discover that all the funds in Nirvana Finance were missing.

Describing the morning of July 28, 2022 in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Hoffman said, “The week we were going to start the full audit, we learned that it was hacked. In a situation like this, you really understand who your real friends are.”

It took 17 months to catch the Nirvana Finance hackers. After a lengthy investigation involving blockchain researchers and multiple law enforcement agencies, software engineer Shakeeb Ahmed was arrested after admitting to hacking Nirvana Finance in December 2023. On April 12, he was sentenced to three years in prison.

Hoffman explained that the investigation took so long because Ahmed’s attack was so “complex.” Despite all the efforts of blockchain researchers, they were constantly hitting a “dead end”.

But the turning point came when an official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent a Telegram message that the investigation believed was a solid lead linking it to the same hacker behind another recent attack.

“He wanted to see if the team could help them build the case,” Hoffman explained.

Hoffman quickly found himself spending the next several months exchanging information with Department of Homeland Security officials, prosecutors, and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigators.

Finally, after comparing and matching the transactions with the other attack, officials asked Hoffman to explain exactly how the protocol’s infrastructure worked. Based on this, they were able to trace the attack to Ahmed.

Although Nirvana Finance is not open source, Hoffman explained that Ahmed “discovered a vulnerability in the code by pinging the system and resolving it.”

Hoffman said these 17 months were incredibly stressful for him. Not only did he lose most of his money, which was tied to a protocol he believed to be foolproof, but he also worried that as an anonymous founder, victims would think he was defrauding the project.

He immediately wanted to reveal his identity so that the founder behind the project could explain that he was not the cause of the attack.

However, threats were coming rapidly to Nirvana Finance’s Twitter account and it was only a matter of time before someone realized who he was.

“I received dozens of death threats and threats to harm my wife, my mother and my children; there was no stopping it,” Hoffman said.

Evaluating the rise and fall of the protocol, Hoffman said he never expected Nirvana Finance to achieve success so quickly.

“We launched it without thinking it would attract a lot of attention. We were trying to do a soft launch,” he said, adding that it was subsequently noticed by several Chinese news publications and the total value locked (TVL) increased significantly. “It reached about 25 million TVL within the first week,” he said.

It rose so quickly that even Solana took notice, and its CEO, Anatoly Yakovenko, personally encouraged him to conduct a security audit of the protocol.

Meanwhile, Hoffman was already on a waiting list to audit; Waiting lists were long among top auditing firms.

“Anatoly personally asked one of the auditing firms if they could move us forward on the list,” Hoffman added. Today, Nirvana Finance is bankrupt but has a plan that is “still in progress.”