Fan Club for Solana’s Saga Phone Loses 750 SOL

Saga DAO, a community-run fan club for Solana’s sellout mobile phone lost over $60,000 in SOL tokens – 70% of its treasury – Wednesday in a chaotic setback for the weeks-old group.

The details surrounding the draining were being debated in Saga’s Discord server at press time. One thing was clear: the money was supposed to be securely held in a multisig wallet, where multiple parties would need to approve any transfer. But no one ever activated that security feature, meaning it only took one of 12 signers to move the funds.

On Wednesday, the group sent 750 in SOL tokens to an address controlled by one of its pseudonymous founders, zkRedDevil, that was supposed to have the security in place. But it didn’t and in minutes the money was sent to another address thought to be under that person’s control. ZkRedDevil claims they were the target of a “remote hack” on their PC and told CoinDesk they lost $35,000 of their own money in addition to the group’s money.

But another of Saga DAO’s pseudonymous founders, who goes by Ashen, pushed back on that narrative Wednesday, accusing zkRedDevil of pulling the heist themself. “That mf zk sent me pics of his kids! I thought that’d be enough to trust him but I guess not,” he said in the group’s Discord server.

The he-said-she-said highlighted the deep risk of operating in pseudonymous environments, where trust in one’s partners is paramount.

It also threw Saga DAO’s future into uncertainty. The fan club started as a Discord server where owners of Solana’s exclusive Saga phone congregated to chat about their phone’s perks, from free airdrops to NFTs. But its ambitions grew after the DAO secured 700 SOL by selling a “pre-launch shitcoin” it had received on a lark.

After the windfall, Saga DAO’s founders had accelerated efforts to build up the group with formal policies and governance mechanisms that would empower owners of the Saga phone, which are Android devices that have special crypto capabilities on Solana.

That money is now gone and the group’s leadership may follow. In a post on Discord, Ashen said he was launching an effort to depose any member of the group’s 12-person council who voted to send the money to its peril. “Whoever takes over this DAO can still do everything they need to to scale and become a fantastic force,” he said.

zkRedDevil maintained their innocence despite Ashen’s assertions.

Ashen “got right to make this statement to try to save the DAO,” they said in a message to CoinDesk, continuing, “Don’t wanna have worked 20/24 since a month to have everything destroyed with my own wallet gone too.”

UPDATE (Jan. 24, 2024, 18:10 UTC): Adds additional detail.