A Week of Over 1500% Growth for DARK, and the People Network Behind the Solana Foundation

On April 17, the Solana ecosystem AI Meme coin DARK briefly surpassed a $32 million market cap, reaching a new all-time high. Over the past week, its market cap has grown by 1500%. In the weak Crypto AI period, how was this AI project able to continue its upward trend? And what is the team behind it, MtnDao?

What is Dark

DARK is an AI that provides an MCP to external platforms under the TEE protocol. Everyone in CryptoAI is familiar with TEE, which has appeared multiple times in CryptoAI projects since last year when developer Ropirito created the emote "tee_hee_he." It is an experimental trusted execution environment designed to ensure AI behavior is not influenced by humans. The term MCP may be more commonly heard recently and can be analogized to a USB-C port for large models, allowing various devices to connect through the same interface without being incompatible when switching devices. Since Anthropic open-sourced MCP on November 25, 2024, it quickly swept the AI field and became popular in CryptoAI starting in February 2025.

Dark, a project composed of these two well-known concepts, pushed its market cap to $30 million in the marginal CryptoAI market due to two main factors: "Founder's decision-making and efficiency" and "Founder's team's future expectations."

Founder's Decision-Making and Efficiency

Friend's transformation over a year after designing a fitness plan, Edgar Pavlovsky

Founder with a love for Quidditch

Founder Edgar Pavlovsky is fluent in English and Russian, a graduate of the University of Utah, a long-standing institution located in Salt Lake City. MtnDao's core base in the "We work" workspace, a collaboration with Solana in February, is also located in downtown Salt Lake City. Looking through his social media, you can see that blockchain was not his passion ten years ago but rather a sport called Quidditch, which dominated almost all his posts from 2014 to 2017. This is a sport derived from Quidditch in Harry Potter.

He spent several years with the Utah Crimson Quidditch community team, which once crowdfunded on indiegogo to participate in the Quidditch World Cup. Unfortunately, they only managed to raise $1450.

The player on the far right in the image is Edgar Pavlovsky

Edgar Pavlovsky's Blockchain Journey

After graduating from college, he worked at Uber and founded several startups. Upon entering the blockchain industry, he not only created the Paladin client to combat MEV attacks but also co-founded the Marginfi Solana ecosystem protocol. In April 2024, he left the team due to a misalignment in values, a departure widely believed to be triggered by the earlier SolBlaze accusation of Marginfi manipulating BLZE emission distribution, causing quite a stir at the time.

Further Reading: "Founder Driven Out, TVL Plunges 20%, What Happened to Marginfi?"

His vision for DARK is not just to sell a concept after merging technologies but to have a complete product theory. Following the launch of $DARK, he shared on social media X, "I am focused on building DARK's first product, as DARK aims to achieve its long-term infrastructure goals, iterative productization and listing are the best ways to achieve it, building in public, adding revenue + distribution, testing new technology in production."

To achieve these goals, the product direction he offered is to attract mobile users with a consumer PWA (Progressive Web App) application experience and to replace traditional applications with frequent user viral spread for increased impact. Ideally, this will showcase the decentralized MCP, represented by DARK, in a broad application's POC (Proof of Concept).

Weekly Product Delivery

These words may sound abstract and vague, likely spoken by countless Crypto founders, which also led to DARK's token price hovering between 2M and 4M from April 7 to April 11. During this period, he presented a product concept for a game AI, expressing his love for the full-chain game Dark Forest and paying tribute to its creator. The DARK version of Dark Forest was packaged to run on a private VPS accessible only to its AI players, who would be containerized and play the game through DARK's Dark Forest MCP.

Players cannot directly play Dark Forest with the AI because it is a world exclusive to them, akin to an AI hunger game. Players can participate in several ways: they can place bets on the AI war outcome through the DARK Market and win rewards, directly sponsor the artificial intelligence by providing them with energy or funding enhancements to defeat competitors, or even design AI strategies that, while not directly adopted, would impact the AI's in-game strategy itself.

Note: Dark Forest is a decentralized large-scale multiplayer online "MMO" space conquest strategy game inspired by the Dark Forest theory from Liu Cixin's sci-fi novel "The Three-Body Problem" series. It was initially launched by MIT graduate Brian Gu as an undergraduate project, later taken over by the 0xPARC Foundation, and to this day, the game remains one of the most representative full-chain games.

On April 11, he announced that the game was complete, and the next day, AI Agents would begin simulating wars. He presented a very promising vision, aiming to expand his influence and reach by creating a VPS game world and consumer watching application game infrastructure for entertainment, coupled with MCP and an agent infrastructure composed of AI containerization to increase his influence and reach—"everyone can start their own gaming environment"—ultimately concentrating the game's value through DARK market transactions of AI warriors and enhancement items.

Dark Version Dark Forest Game Screenshot

By this point, DARK's token price had surged to a peak $9 million market cap. Besides the vision, the market witnessed the horrifying speed of the first product delivery within a few days. On April 16, the product was officially launched. Within 24 hours of launch, it surged another 100%, rising from a $14 million market cap to a $32 million market cap.

Meanwhile, Edgar's female friend H「hnxyn_」, also a member of MtnDao, revealed the truth behind it, pointing out that Edgar is almost always working, stating, "Today he worked at my tattoo studio, worked in a taxi on the way to the bar to see a friend's band, worked at the bar where our friend's band was playing, and now we are at our second bar of the night."

Edgar Pavlovsky Working at a Bar

The DAO Behind

The "Peak" Behind DARK—MtnDAO

Following the DARK issuance on April 9th, the developer community DAO organization MtnDAO, co-founded by Edgar Pavlovsky and Barrett, concluded its fundraising for MtnCapital on MetaDAO. MtnDao has been deeply involved in the early development of the Solana developer community, and Mtn Capital is their attempt to create a new investment management model, using futarchy or "market prediction" to guide governance decisions — where $MTN can be likened to futures, managed by a futures-based fund. In the end, within 7 days, a total of 1,931 contributors raised $5.75 million for it.

The organization's investments will be decided by traders, and the approval of proposals will depend on the trading behavior of those speculating on the MTN token price. Decisions will be made based on the trend of the MTN token. In essence, if traders believe a proposal, such as "investing $100,000 in BTC," is beneficial to Mtn Capital, they will buy to drive up the MTN price, ultimately leading to the proposal's approval. Conversely, if they think this transaction is detrimental to Mtn Capital, they will sell to drive down the MTN price, resulting in the proposal's failure.

Is Dark the Initial Confirmation of the Futarchy DAO Concept?

This concept was not first introduced by MtnDao. Rather, it was proposed by George Mason University economist Robin Hanson in a 2007 paper, where the concept of futarchy trading was introduced, with the premise that speculative markets may make better decisions than purely democratic states. Hanson believes that participants in speculative markets, such as the stock and betting markets, are incentivized to conduct the necessary research to understand the best outcomes for their interests and act accordingly through buying and selling behaviors.

Proph3t Appears at Solana Event Wearing Mask of His Own Image

The founder of the fundraising platform MetaDAO, Proph3t, is a proponent of this concept, believing that "the goal of a DAO is to make better decisions, and market experience surpasses that of experts." Within MetaDAO, project proposals from entities like Jito DAO, Sancutm, Ore, Drift, among others, will utilize a transaction futures model and appear in MetaDAO's proposal library.

MtnDAO has a long-standing connection with MetaDAO. Besides the mysterious Proph3t frequently "appearing" at MtnDAO's coworking space, founder Edgar Pavlovsky had already invested $2.2 million in MetaDAO by 2024, making MtnDAO the first project on the fundraising platform.

Founder Barrett stated, "Mtn Capital will focus on Solana-native projects because Solana is the home of MtnCapital and where the highest returns are expected." Investments by Mtn Capital in startups are separate from those in MtnDAO's portfolio but operate under a parallel brand. The fund's investment approach is highly flexible, allowing capital deployment across various opportunities, from early-stage private investments to highly liquid public tokens.

Solana Labs CEO Toly at MtnDAO's Hacker House in Salt Lake City

This flexibility enables mtnCapital to adapt to evolving market conditions, regardless of development stage or liquidity status, while benefiting from the collective wisdom of the mtndao community through the futarchy governance mechanism. Founder Barrett said, "I believe its performance will outshine that of venture capital funds." He also mentioned that typical investment firms tend to lean towards long positions rather than shorts in the beginning, hence the choice to initiate open fundraising at the market's bottom.

Mtn Capital Treasury

The launch of Mtn Capital coincides closely with DARK, with the token deployed on pumpfun on November 24, 2024, five months ahead of DARK's launch. This early deployment was certainly not a spur-of-the-moment decision. This inevitably leads the community to speculate on the relationship between the two. On one hand, there are questions about whether the $5.85 million in the treasury will be used for DARK's development. On the other hand, there is anticipation regarding the MtnDAO and the founder's connections in the Solana network.

These two reasons have driven DARK's token price steadily upward. DARK's two ATHs also coincided with increases in MTN's token price, particularly with the price breakthroughs of DARK on April 11th and April 17th. With each of DARK's price surges, MTN's price doubled, reaching a market cap of around $10 million (the IDO token's initial market cap was approximately $5.5 million). This indirectly reinforces the viewpoints of Mtn DAO and MetaDAO, suggesting that perhaps the true essence of DAO tokens lies in the ongoing potential value output, or "futures." Dark may indeed be the shadow of this mountain.