A CFO just got 78 months for losing $35 million of his company's money in DeFi, and the real story isn't the fraud, it's what he thought he could get away with.
The Signal
Nevin Shetty, CFO of Tivic Health, moved $35 million in company funds to his personal DeFi platform between 2021 and 2022. Not a hack. Not a mistake. A bet. He thought he could generate returns, skim profits, return the principal, and no one would notice. Then Terra/Luna collapsed in May 2022, taking nearly all of it with it.
This wasn't some sophisticated financial engineering. Court documents show Shetty simply wired company money to exchanges, converted it to stablecoins, and deployed it into yield farming protocols. The kind of stuff thousands of people were doing in their spare time during the DeFi summer. Except he was doing it with a publicly traded medical device company's treasury.
The striking part: he almost pulled it off for over a year. The controls that should have caught this, the board oversight, the audit committees, they all failed until the money evaporated. Tivic Health's market cap today is around $3 million. The company he helped destroy was worth more than the theft.
This is the shadow side of 2021's "institutions are coming" narrative. They came. Some of them brought their CFOs' personal risk appetite and precisely zero updated controls for digital assets. While everyone was writing think pieces about BlackRock and ETFs, small and mid-cap companies were learning expensive lessons about custody, about segregation of duties, about what happens when you can move millions with a seed phrase.
The Implication
Every company board should be asking right now: who has access to move our digital assets, and what stops them? The answer "our CFO would never" just cost Tivic shareholders everything. As tokenization brings more real world assets onchain, the control gap between TradFi and DeFi becomes the gap where careers and companies disappear. The tools exist. Multisig. Hardware custody. Third party verification. Using them just isn't sexy enough to make the conference circuit.
Source: Decrypt