If you buy WHITE before October, it will be a 17-fold increase in the coin.

According to CoinGecko data, the Whiteheart (WHITE) price is $3,599 at the time of writing, representing an increase of 633.96% in 24 hours and a 1783.24% increase in the price in the last seven days. If you haven’t heard of the project, that’s okay because no one else has heard of it either. But unfortunately, Whiteheart is shutting down.

Crypto’s “Red Cross”

Whiteheart is an on-chain options trading protocol built by anonymous developer Molly Wintermute, which previously raised over $20 million in an ICO.

Whiteheart is built on top of Hegic and wants to solve the problem of using hedging contracts to help DeFi users protect their ETH and WBTC holdings from falling values. As a result, Whiteheart’s official Twitter profile refers to itself as Crypto’s Red Cross, but the account hasn’t been updated since July 2021.

The alpha version of Whiteheart offers two types of hedging in the form of WHETH and WHWBTC and integrates hedging contracts. WHETH is a packaged Ether (ETH) that contains ATM (at-the-money) put options that automatically protect its holders from USD losses.

On November 27, according to Spot on Chain monitoring, the address starting with 0x117 exchanged 1,171 ETH (worth about $2.4 million) for 2,900 WHITE, causing the price of WHITE to soar by 764.78%.

Notably, the address received 21,625 ETH (worth about $44.3 million) from the Hegic Development Fund on October 8. Given that Whiteheart is a Hegic-based on-chain hedging protocol, it is reasonable to guess that the address belongs to the development team.

On December 1, Hegic officially released a statement saying that “after a long period of uncertainty, the story of Whiteheart is over”, Hegic said in a blog post that the Whiteheart protocol concept is fantastic, but the focus over the past few years has been on the development of Hegic, which has evolved from the idea of a basic hedging contract. As a result, they decided to close Whiteheart permanently. All funds previously raised will be returned to token holders at the IBCO price (1 $WHITE ≈ 1.708 $WETH).

Anonymous developer Molly

Whiteheart launched itself as a gentle fork of Hegic to show the DeFi protocol developer community a new way to praise the efforts of other developers while sharing future economic benefits with the forked protocol.

But now that Whiteheart’s story is over, Hegic is still around.

Hegic was also created by Molly Wintermute. As a Twitter celebrity, Molly Wintermute is like Satoshi Nakamoto, and no one knows who he is.

In a 2020 interview, Molly Wintermute described herself as someone with no social capital or reputation in the crypto and DeFi space, "I’m building the Hegic protocol from the ground up. The crypto community can only judge me by what they themselves see in my code. 」

But the anonymous has his own Twitter account, and Molly Wintermute’s first tweet appeared on January 28, 2020. Molly Wintermute said: "Validate myself: I am mollywintermute. 」

The next day, the account posted a mysterious message: “1v3 b33n w0rk1ng 0n smthng th4t AI c4ll /Hegic/. AI h0p3 t0 r3v34l my cr34ture 4s4p. #Hegic” has been released. Soon after this peculiar introduction, Hegic was launched.

The Hegic protocol was first released on February 20, 2020 with the goal of removing the complexity of options trading and enabling users to use it seamlessly in their day-to-day work.

For example, a user can buy a 100 ETH call option on Hegic for $1,899 with a 15-day term, during which time if the spot ETH is higher than $1,899, the user will be able to exercise the right to buy 100 ETH and profit from the difference between the spot price and $1,899, minus the cost of the option premium.

Related Reading: Hegic: Hedging Risk in DeFi Markets with Options

But Hegic didn’t go well at first. A few hours after the v1.0 mainnet launch, a bug in the contract code locked up nearly $30,000 worth of user funds. When the hedged contract expires and the holder does not exercise it, the error prevents the user from unlocking their funds.

Subsequently, Wintermute, with the support of early contributors to the project, refunded all lost funds to those affected by the code. In May 2020, Wintermute released a new audited version of the protocol.