Zerebro developer Jeffie Yue is found alive at her parents’ home in San Francisco, days after fake his suicide in a live stream that fired more than $100 million posthumous memo coins.
Yu’s case is not the first time that Crypto has blurred the boundaries between actual deaths, false deaths, and anything in between.
From fugitives to sealed cases, the industry has a long history of exits that left more questions than closures.
Here are five unsettling cases (real, stage, or unresolved) that continue to plague the world of cryptography.
1. Jeffie Yue fakes his death, then his code pumped up.
A clip of Yu broadcasting his “suicide” came out on May 4th. The video shows him smoking a cigarette before pulling the trigger, and the camera dropped.
A few hours later, a scheduled social media post announced the posthumous release of Lljeffy, a Memecoin called his “final work of art.” Coins have skyrocketed in market capitalization by nearly $105 million.
But Yu was not dead. The blockchain wallet tied to him continued to move. A copy of the letter, which is said to have been written by Yu, described the exit design in response to ongoing harassment and horror mail.
A San Francisco Standard reporter eventually discovered YU at his parents’ home. He declined to comment on the suicide stunt or whether he benefited from it.
In the world of Memecoins, this kind of sight is nothing new. In late 2024, Pump.Fun’s livestream feature caused a wave of suicide threats, animal cruelty and other shocking behaviors to pump the price of tokens. The company shut it down and later rebooted the tonedown version.
2. Code whistleblower’s descent and the possibility of death to delusion
In February 2025, a suspected Chinese programmer called Hu Lezhi burned 500 ether (ETH) (worth around $1.3 million at the time) and donated another 1,950 ETH (over $5 million) to various groups such as Wikileaks and The Ethereum Foundation.
All of it came with an Onchain message claiming that a hedge fund called Wizardquant (aka Kuande Investment) was using “brain computer weapons” to control employees.
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Messages read like sci-fi horror. Hu claimed he had been a subject of mind control since childhood, warning about a future in which humans are nothing more than “a perfect slave to puppets and digital machines.”
In one of his final messages, Hu said that if he reaches the final stage of becoming a “complete slave to a digital machine”, he will “leave the world.” Some have translated a series of messages as on-chain suicide notes.
To date, they have not re-emerged. Unlike Yu, Hu’s wallet is not moving.
3. Encryption and mysterious tweets before his death
On October 28, 2022, Defi developer Nikolai Mushegian posted a cold tweet saying, “Cia, Mossad and Pedo Elite are running some kind of sex trafficking threatening blackmail ring… They’ll torture me and die.”
By the next morning he had been facing down on a surf near a beach house in Puerto Rico.
Mushegian was not a child with random codes. He was an early developer of Makerdao and a key architect in the Stablecoin ecosystem.
He also became more and more paranoid. Critics dismissed the tweet as a mental health crisis, but others weren’t too quick to look away.
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The timing of his death sparked a wave of theory, including assassination, target silencing, and even Mukultra-style mind control.
Officially, it was judged as a random drowsing.
4. Crypto investors can’t believe in the death of the founder of Quadrigacx
In December 2018, Gerald Cotten, the 30-year-old founder of Canadian Crypto Exchange Quadrigacx, reportedly died of Crohn’s disease in India.
But there was one major problem. He was the only person with access to the $190 million code.
So did the questions when news of his death spread. There was no public autopsy, his death certificate mistook his name (spewing Kotten as Kotten), hoping that the cas would be sealed and that a growing army of investors would dig into his body for a DNA test.
Quadriga officially declared bankruptcy in 2019. Thousands of clients have been locked out of the funds. Eventually, investigators discovered the cold wallet was empty and urged the auditor to begin recovery efforts.
Cotten’s suspects have been implementing the Ponzi scheme for many years, using his death as the ultimate escape plan. No rumors have been confirmed, but official stories remain that he died of a tragic death, as confirmed by Indian authorities.
5. Reports of Cryptoqueen’s death are highly exaggerated
Since riding a Ryan Air flight from Sofia to Athens in October 2017, self-styled “Cryptoqueen” Ruja Ignatova has not been seen as the co-founder of the $4 billion Onecoin scam.
Cotten left no access. Ignatova left no traces.
Rumors have been swirling ever since. Some say she has undergone plastic surgery and lives under a new identity, or is protected by the Bulgarian mafia.
The Bulgarian investigation outlet claims Ignatova was murdered in November 2018 on a yacht in the Ionian Sea, and her body was cut off and dumped overboard under the orders of Bulgarian crime boss Cristophoros Amanatidis.
More recently, German officials reportedly assumed Ignatova was in the outskirts of South Africa where he lives with private security.
Ignatova has been on the US FBI’s most wanted list since 2022.
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