Mochi founder Azeem Ahmed sold 550,000 $CVX from a Curve-linked stock, as on-chain probes claim over $8 million in redirected rewards and $54 million in DeFi losses.
Summary
- Mochi Finance founder Azeem Ahmed sold about 550,285 $CVX for around $946,000, causing the token to fall by more than 10%.
- The $CVX stack dates back to a 2021 curve pool drain that left liquidity providers with an estimated $54 million in losses.
- Ahmed now faces years of on-chain fraud allegations spanning at least four DeFi projects, involving diverted rewards and liquidity withdrawals of more than $8 million.
Azeem Ahmed, founder of Mochi Finance and GaiaDAO, has approximately 550,285 Convex Finance ($CVX) tokens from wallets associated with a 2021 Curve Finance drain, which netted approximately $946,000 and triggered a double-digit intraday drop $CVX‘s price. On March 19, the tokens were liquidated at an average price of approximately $1.72 $CVX from around $1.88 to $1.68, a drop of more than 10% according to on-chain data reviewed by Crypto Daily. The proceeds went to a multisig linked to the Mochi protocol, which had approximately $864,858 in assets after the sale, while another 500,000 $CVX stay locked to Convex Finance.
The $CVX The position itself stems from Mochi’s controversial move in November 2021 to mint its USDM stablecoin against MOCHI and withdraw approximately $46 million in DAI-equivalent liquidity from the USDM/3CRV pool on Curve. At the time, Mochi used 10 billion MOCHI tokens – which were assigned a hardcoded oracle price despite a near-zero market value – to mint 46 million USDM, converting the proceeds into 9,876. $ETHand buy approximately 1,050,285 $CVXwhich were then locked to Convex Finance, according to certified crypto-trace reports from forensics firm IFW Global. Curve’s Emergency DAO responded by killing Mochi’s meter and blocking further emissions after characterizing the maneuver as a “clear governance attack,” a clash that became part of the broader “Curve Wars” over $CVX and CRV’s voting power and emissions.
In the aftermath, Ahmed re-emerged through GaiaDAO with a Peg Rebalancing Module (PBM) as a mechanism to distribute $CVX distribute locked rewards to USDM holders and gradually restore the stablecoin’s peg. The PBM charged a 2% management fee and a 20% performance fee payable to Ahmed, but according to Curve governance forum records, he unilaterally increased the performance fee to 50% before community resistance forced him to reverse the change. By November 2025, reward distributions from the 1,050,285 vlCVX position had stopped completely, and on-chain data indicates that these rewards were redirected to a wallet that also acts as a signatory on the $CVX multisig, with the value of the diverted wagering rewards alone estimated at more than $1.6 million.
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In addition to strike flows, researchers claim there are approximately 2,198 $ETH– worth approximately $6.67 million at the time – and $471,429 in USDC were siphoned out of Mochi/$ETH liquidity accumulated and never returned to depositors, while airdrops from protocols like Prisma, CNC, VELO, LFT and YB reportedly went unclaimed or undistributed. Total investor losses associated with the Mochi ecosystem and its associated pools are now estimated at over $54 million, according to IFW Global’s certified reports.
Ahmed’s track record dates back at least to 2020 and includes Yieldfarming.insure (SAFE), Armor.fi, Mochi Finance and GaiaDAO, with repeated accusations of embezzling community funds. During the original Mochi-Curve showdown, Curve claimed that Mochi’s strategy amounted to a governance attack, while Ahmed insisted in an interview with Crypto Briefing that the team had simply taken a “bold approach to gain voting power in the DAO” and argued that the “DeFi cartel… feels threatened that a small player in the suburbs” could challenge the incumbents. Robert Forster, Ahmed’s former co-founder at Armor.fi, later publicly accused him of stealing “millions of LP tokens,” a charge that Ahmed denied by claiming the money had been “fully returned” and claiming Forster had taken money for his personal use.
Legal pressure has also followed the drama in the courts. A previous lawsuit by an Armor.fi user in San Francisco Supreme Court (Chen v. Ahmed, case number CGC-21-589609) ended in an out-of-court settlement after a request for a temporary restraining order, according to documents referenced in IFW Global’s reports. Lawyers are now pointing to potential U.S. claims involving securities fraud under Section 10(b), racketeering (RICO), common law fraud, conversion and unjust enrichment, and affected investors have been directed to file complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the FBI’s IC3 portal.
Ahmed’s liquidation on March 19 is the most aggressive move in the chain of Mochi-linked wallets since the 2021 Curve incident and is being read by many affected investors as confirmation that the locked $CVX will be used for exit liquidity rather than refund. With approximately 500,000 $CVX still tied to Convex Finance and controlled through the same governance structure, further sales could become major liquidity events $CVX and once again raise questions about how DeFi protocols respond when governance power is gained through exploits rather than open market purchases. Ahmed, described in IFW documentation as a British citizen, has not publicly responded to the latest allegations and his social media profiles have been inactive for months.
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