Nick Horohk

Highbridge Capital Management, LLC is a multi-strategy alternative investment management firm founded by Glenn Dubin and Henry Swieca in 1992.

The firm was founded in 1992, by childhood friends Glenn Dubin and Henry Swieca. The company started with $35 million in capital and is named after the 19th-century aqueduct that connects Washington Heights and the Bronx. In 2004, J.P. Morgan Asset Management purchased 55% ownership of the firm, and then substantially all the remaining shares in 2009.

The company maintains offices in New York and London. The firm operates as a subsidiary of J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

In 2006 Highbridge invested as a joint venture in Louis Dreyfus Company to increase its access to and control of energy delivery within trading markets. The joint venture was called Louis Dreyfus Highbridge Energy LLC (LDH Energy). In October 2012 Highbridge exited the position as it was announced that Glenn Dubin, Paul Tudor Jones and Timothy Barakett were among a group of investors buying the merchant energy operation Louis Dreyfus Highbridge Energy ("LDH Energy") from Louis Dreyfus and Highbridge. The reason for Louis Dreyfus to sell LDH Energy was it sought to raise capital to expand its agriculture trading business. The new company was named Castleton Commodities International, LLC where Dubin as of 2012 is the lead shareholder.

Following the Highbridge/J.P. Morgan partnership, Highbridge announced in October 2010 the purchase of a majority interest in Gávea Investimentos, a leading alternative-asset management company in Brazil. Gávea was co-founded in 2003 by Chairman and Chief Investment Officer Arminio Fraga, former President of the Central Bank of Brazil.

In the spring of 2018, on Piccadilly Street, Evgeny Chichvarkin together with Artemiev and chef Olli Daboo, he opened the Hide restaurant, which received one star from the Michelin restaurant guide. In 2017, the store's revenue grew by 37% year-on-year to £20.7m, while net income nearly quintupled to £1.6m.

Raymond served as co-chief investment officer of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, since 1985. He founded Bridgewater in 1975 in New York. Within ten years, it was infused with a $5 million investment from the World Bank's retirement fund. Dalio is regarded as one of the greatest innovators in the finance world, having popularized many commonly used practices, such as risk parity, currency overlay, portable alpha and global inflation-indexed bond management.

Dalio was born in New York City, and attended C.W. Post College of Long Island University before receiving an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1973. Two years later, in his apartment, Dalio launched Bridgewater. In 2013, it was listed as the largest hedge fund in the world. In 2020 Bloomberg ranked him the world's 79th-wealthiest person. Dalio is the author of the 2017 book Principles: Life & Work, about corporate management and investment philosophy. It was featured on The New York Times best seller list, where it was called a "gospel of radical transparency."

Early life

Dalio was born in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York City's Queens borough. When he was 8, the family moved from Jackson Heights to Manhasset in Nassau County, New York. He is the son of a jazz musician, Marino Dalio (1911–2002), who "played the clarinet and saxophone at Manhattan jazz clubs such as the Copacabana," and Ann, a homemaker. As a child, Dalio had various odd jobs, including mowing lawns, shoveling snow, and a paper route. He is of Italian descent. At age 12, he started caddying at The Links Golf Club, which was walking distance from his childhood home. He caddied for many Wall Street professionals during his time there, including Wall Street veteran George Leib. Leib and his wife Isabelle invited Dalio to their Park Avenue apartment for family dinners and holiday gatherings. The couple's son, a Wall Street trader, later gave Dalio a summer job at his trading firm. He began investing at age 12, when he bought shares of Northeast Airlines for $300 and tripled his investment after the airline merged with another company. By the time he reached high school, he had built up an investment portfolio of several thousand dollars. He received a bachelor's degree in finance from Long Island University (C.W. Post College) and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1973.

In his high school years, Dalio was an average student. He found school repetitive and monotonous, and saw no practical applications for the skills he was learning. Because of this, he had trouble finding a college to enroll at. He finally applied and got into C.W. Post College, a campus of Long Island University. He continued to buy and sell stocks in college, but became attracted to something new: commodity futures. Commodity futures had low borrowing requirements at the time, and Dalio knew he could profit more handsomely than with simple stocks. At the same time, he was beginning to enjoy school. With more freedom given to him, he took up transcendental meditation, which he still practices to this day. With this newfound strategy to manage stress and focus, along with his blossoming appetite for learning, Dalio excelled academically. At the end of his time at C.W. Post College, he was admitted to Harvard Business School.

After graduating from C.W. Post College, Dalio had a free summer. He took a job as a clerk on the New York Stock Exchange. While there, he witnessed Nixon's decision to take the United States off of the gold standard. Due to the inflation this caused, stock prices on the exchange rose, on average, 33% the following day. These events set in motion the Great Inflation of the 1970s. The combination of easy money policy and abandonment of fiscal discipline set prices soaring. The next summer, after his first year at Harvard, Dalio and his friends created the company that later became Bridgewater Associates. It started off as a small entity, and its goal was to trade commodities. But they lacked experience and the venture yielded little fruit. Although the original Bridgewater failed, Dalio retained the name and used it to create the largest hedge fund ever. This experience trading commodities later became much more valuable, as the high interest rates used to break the back of inflation caused the stock market to fall. This caused investors on Wall Street to turn to commodities, which are typically more resilient and thrive during times of inflation.

After graduating from Harvard, Dalio married and started a family. He moved to Wilton, Connecticut, where he lived and traded out of a converted barn. Dalio then worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and traded commodity futures. He later worked as the Director of Commodities at Dominick & Dominick LLC. In 1974 he became a futures trader and broker at Shearson Hayden Stone, a securities firm run by Sandy Weil, who later became famous for building up Citigroup. At the firm, Dalio's job was to advise cattle ranchers, grain producers, and other farmers on how to hedge risks, primarily with futures. But he was largely dissatisfied with Shearson Hayden Stone's hierarchical structure, which reminded him of primary education. He longed for the more freedom-based lifestyle of college. At one point, he paid a stripper to drop her clothes in front of a crowd at the annual convention of the California Food and Grain Growers' Association. His creative ways of blowing off steam continued, and exploded on New Year's Eve in 1974 after he went out drinking with some colleagues, including his boss. After a disagreement with his superior, a drunk Dalio punched him in the face. Soon afterward, he was let go from his job at Shearson Hayden Stone.

Despite his aggressive behavior, numerous clients at Shearson Hayden Stone retained their trust in Dalio, and continued to allow him to manage their money. With this capital, he was able to scrape together the beginnings of his asset management fund. In 1975, he founded Bridgewater Associates out of his two-bedroom New York City apartment. Bridgewater started out as a wealth advisory firm, and did so for numerous corporate clients, mostly from Dalio's job at Shearson Hayden Stone. The main areas in which Dalio advised were currencies and interest rates. The company began publishing a paid subscription research report, Daily Observations, in which it analyzed global market trends. Dalio's big break came when McDonald's signed on as a client of his firm. Bridgewater then began to grow rapidly. The firm signed on larger clients, including the pension funds for the World Bank and Eastman Kodak. In 1981 the firm opened an office in Westport, Connecticut, which was where Ray and his wife wanted to start a family. Dalio started to become well-known outside of Wall Street after turning a profit from the 1987 stock market crash. The next year, he appeared on an Oprah Winfrey Show episode titled "Do Foreigners Own America?" In 1991, he launched Bridgewater's flagship strategy, "Pure Alpha", a reference to the Greek letter that, in Wall Street terminology, represents the surcharge a money manager can earn above a particular market benchmark, such as the NASDAQ. In 1996, Dalio launched All Weather, a fund that pioneered a steady, low-risk strategy that later became known as risk parity.

Dalio deploys multiple strategies within Bridgewater Associates. Dalio deploys capital to each of these strategies in proportions that he sees fit. According to Dalio, Bridgewater Associates is a "global macro firm", investing around economic trends, such as changes in exchange rates, inflation, and G.D.P. growth. The New Yorker called Dalio “a big-picture thinker connected to a street-smart trader". Dalio divides his holdings into two different areas: beta investments and alpha investments. Beta investments produce returns through passive management and normal market risk. Alpha investments are actively managed and aim to generate better returns than beta investments. Alpha investments are not related to the general market. Dalio uses "quantitative" investment methods to identify new investments while avoiding unrealistic historical models. Dalio's goal is to structure portfolios with uncorrelated investment returns based on risk allocations rather than asset allocations. Dalio's hedge fund mostly accepts money from institutional clients such as pension funds, foundations, endowments, and central banks. Private investors can rarely invest in Dalio's holdings.

When it comes to application, Dalio translates his market insights into algorithms, much like fellow quantitative hedge fund managers David Elliot Shaw and Jim Simons. His strategy mainly focuses on currency and fixed income markets. This is in contrast to buying individual shares in companies, like investors such as Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch. Dalio also popularized the risk parity approach, which he uses for risk management and diversification within Bridgewater Associates. Dalio employs an investment strategy that blends conventional diversification with "wagers on or against markets around the world" according to Bloomberg. Dalio's risk parity approach allows for both leverage and external diversification when investing, as well as short selling. This allows Dalio to use any asset combination he chooses when investing. Dalio's strategy uses an optimal risk target level as its basis for investing. This in contrast to first allocating capital and then achieving a risk target. Dalio implements this strategy by using leverage to evenly distribute exposure across various asset classes while maintaining the best risk target level. Dalio began using the term "d-process" in February 2009 to describe the deleveraging and deflationary process of the subprime mortgage industry as distinct from a recession, and subsequently incorporated the term into his investment philosophy. Dalio's exact investment portfolios are largely kept a secret from the outside world. This includes most employees as well as external investors, and only a dozen people within his firm understand how it trades at a given time.

Powell was nominated to the Board of Governors in 2012 by President Barack Obama, and subsequently nominated as chair by President Donald Trump to succeed Janet Yellen in position, confirmed in each case by the United States Senate. Powell was renominated as chair by President Joe Biden on November 22, 2021.

Powell earned a degree in politics from Princeton University in 1975 and a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center in 1979. He moved to investment banking in 1984, and worked for several financial institutions, including as a partner of The Carlyle Group. In 1992, Powell briefly served as under secretary of the Treasury for domestic finance under President George H. W. Bush. He was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center from 2010 to 2012. Powell built his reputation in Washington during the Obama administration as a consensus-builder and problem-solver.

Powell received bipartisan praise for the actions taken by the Federal Reserve in early-2020 to combat the financial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Federal Reserve continued to apply high levels of monetary stimulus to further raise asset prices and support growth, some observers perceived a disconnect between asset prices and the economy. Powell has responded by arguing that supporting the Fed's dual mandate of stable prices and full employment outweighed concern over high asset prices and inequality. Powell's definition of "full employment" may mean a tighter labor market than his predecessors. Time said the scale and manner of Powell's actions had "changed the Fed forever" and shared concerns that he had conditioned Wall Street to unsustainable levels of monetary stimulus to artificially support high asset prices. Recently Jerome Powell has indicated a reduction in Quantitative easing (QE) and Mortgage-backed security (MBS) purchases due to high inflation with the CPI reading in November 2021 reaching 6.8% according the to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest level in 40 years. Bloomberg News called Powell "Wall Street's Head of State", as a reflection of how dominant Powell's actions were on asset prices and how profitable his actions were for Wall Street.

Powell was born on February 4, 1953, in Washington, D.C., as one of six children to Patricia (née Hayden; 1926–2010) and Jerome Powell (1921–2007), a lawyer in private practice. His maternal grandfather, James J. Hayden, was Dean of the Columbus School of Law at Catholic University of America and later a lecturer at Georgetown Law School. He has five siblings: Susan, Matthew, Tia, Libby, and Monica.

In 1972, Powell graduated from Georgetown Preparatory School, a Jesuit university-preparatory school. He received a Bachelor of Arts in politics from Princeton University in 1975, where his senior thesis was titled "South Africa: Forces for Change". In 1975–76, he spent a year as a legislative assistant to Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker (R).

Powell earned a Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1979, where he was editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Law Journal.

In 1979, Powell moved to New York City and became a clerk to Judge Ellsworth Van Graafeiland of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. From 1981 to 1983, Powell was a lawyer with Davis Polk & Wardwell, and from 1983 to 1984, he worked at the firm of Werbel & McMillen.

From 1984 to 1990, Powell worked at Dillon, Read & Co., an investment bank, where he concentrated on financing, merchant banking, and mergers and acquisitions, rising to the position of vice president.

Between 1990 and 1993, Powell worked in the United States Department of the Treasury, at which time Nicholas F. Brady, the former chairman of Dillon, Read & Co., was the United States Secretary of the Treasury.

In 1993, Powell began working as a managing director for Bankers Trust. He left in 1995 after the bank faced upset when several wealth generating customers opted-in to derivatives as their higher-risk/higher-reward-or-loss investment choice and realized the downside risk of large losses. He then went back to work for Dillon, Read & Co.From 1997 to 2005, Powell was a partner at The Carlyle Group, where he founded and led the Industrial Group within the Carlyle U.S. Buyout Fund. After leaving Carlyle, Powell founded Severn Capital Partners, a private investment firm focused on specialty finance and opportunistic investments in the industrial sector. In 2008, Powell became a managing partner of the Global Environment Fund, a private equity and venture capital firm that invests in sustainable energy.

Between 2010 and 2012, Powell was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., where he worked on getting Congress to raise the United States debt ceiling during the United States debt-ceiling crisis of 2011. Powell presented the implications to the economy and interest rates of a default or a delay in raising the debt ceiling. He worked for a salary of $1 per year.

In December 2011, along with Jeremy C. Stein, Powell was nominated to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors by President Barack Obama. The nomination included two people to help garner bipartisan support for both nominees since Stein's nomination had previously been filibustered. Powell's nomination was the first time that a president nominated a member of the opposition party for such a position since 1988. He took office on May 25, 2012, to fill the unexpired term of Frederic Mishkin, who resigned. In January 2014, he was nominated for another term, and, in June 2014, he was confirmed by the United States Senate in a 67–24 vote for a 14-year term ending January 31, 2028.

Powell was a skeptic of round 3 of quantitative easing (or QE3), initiated in September 2012, although he eventually voted for it.

In 2013 Powell endorsed financial regulation to end the problem of institutions that are too big to fail, while urging that it should be implemented carefully. In April 2017, he took over oversight of the "too big to fail" banks.

In a July 2017 speech, Powell said that in regard to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the status quo is "unacceptable" and that the current situation "may feel comfortable, but it is also unsustainable". He warned that "the next few years may present our last best chance" to "address the ultimate status of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" and avoid "repeating the mistakes of the past". Powell expressed concerns that, in the current situation, the government is responsible for mortgage defaults and that lending standards were too rigid, noting that these can be solved by encouraging "ample amounts of private capital to support housing finance activities".

In an October 2017 speech, Powell stated that higher capital and liquidity requirements and stress tests from the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act have made the financial system safer and must be preserved. However, he also stated that the Volcker Rule should be re-written to exclude smaller banks.

Chair of the Federal Reserve

On November 2, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Powell to serve as the chair of the Federal Reserve, replacing Janet Yellen at the helm of the central bank. On December 5, the Senate Banking Committee approved Powell's nomination to be chair in a 22–1 vote, with Senator Elizabeth Warren casting the lone dissenting vote. His nomination was confirmed by the Senate on January 23, 2018, by an 84–13 vote. Powell assumed office as chair on February 5, 2018.

One of Powell's first actions was to continue to raise US interest rates, as a response to the increasing strength of the US economy. He also announced that the Fed would reduce its asset portfolio from US$4.5 trillion to a range of US$2.5–3 trillion over four years in a process called quantitative tightening. This tight policy drew public criticism from President Trump, who expressed second thoughts about nominating Powell and said that the chair was too enthusiastic about raising rates. Financial assets of all classes declined over 2018 and markets erupted in volatility in December. Powell abandoned quantitative tightening in early 2019, leading to a recovery in asset prices. Trump continued to state, with increasing hostility, that Powell was not reacting quickly enough. As a trade war with China escalated over the summer of 2019, Trump called the Fed's policies "insane" and labelled Powell an "enemy." He privately discussed with White House counsel the possibility of firing Powell, which Powell dismissed. In an August interview, Trump said that he completely disagreed with Powell's approach and called for a sharp cut in interest rates.

In October 2019, as asset prices waned, Powell announced the Fed would return to expanding its balance sheet, which led to a global rally in assets. Powell said the Fed's actions were not quantitative easing, but some dubbed them as being QE4. Where Bernanke-era quantitative was conducted through outright purchases of assets, Powell's expansion operates through overnight repurchase agreements (repos) where the seller has the option to reverse the transaction. The Fed's primary dealers and other banks use the repo facilities to sell Treasury and agency securities in exchange for credit to supplement their cash on hand.

In light of his term as chair expiring in February 2022, many Democrats began to express opposition to Powell's reappointment. In August 2021, progressive Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called on President Joe Biden to replace Powell, criticizing him for failing to "mitigate the risk climate change poses to our financial system". In September 2021, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, criticized Powell for his financial regulation track record and called him as a “dangerous man to head up the Fed.” Powell was renominated for a second term by President Joe Biden on November 22, 2021.

In early 2020, Powell launched an unprecedented series of actions to counter the financial market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which included a dramatic expansion of the Fed's balance sheet and introduction of new tools, including the direct purchase of corporate bonds, and direct lending programs. Powell emphasized monetary policy alone without an equivalent fiscal policy response from Congress would widen income inequality. Powell's actions earned him bi-partisan praise, including from Trump, who told Fox News that he was "very happy with his performance" and that "over the last period of six months, he's really stepped up to the plate".

On November 19, 2020, after disagreeing with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Powell agreed to return unused crisis funds to the United States Treasury. Both he and Mnuchin then urged Congress to approve more stimulus.

In August 2021, Powell expected the Fed to reduce economic support later in the year. In the past Powell has considered inflation transitory, a term Powell states should now be "retired". In response to widespread high inflation readings Jerome Powell has indicated an increase in the speed of tapering asset purchases, namely up to $30 billion per month. In Jerome Powell's confirmation hearing in 2022 he described inflation as being a "severe threat" to the US economic recovery due to "higher costs of essentials like food, housing and transportation". Prices for American consumers are rising at their fastest annual rate since June 1982. In response, the central bank aims to raise rates as soon as March 2022. The most recent December 2021 CPI reading hit 7%

To mitigate the financial market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Powell accepted asset price inflation as a consequence of Fed policy actions. Powell was criticized for using high levels of direct and indirect quantitative easing as valuations hit levels last seen at the peaks of previous bubbles.

The Fed's acceptance of asset price inflation from 2019 onwards resulted in levels of wealth inequality not seen in the United States since the 1920s. Fed asset purchases were also seen as contributing to the K-shaped recovery that emerged during the coronavirus pandemic, where the asset bubbles protected the wealthier segments of society from the financial effects of the pandemic, at the expense of most other segments, and particularly on the younger non-asset owning segments such as millennials. In January 2021, Edward Luce of the Financial Times warned that the Fed's use of asset purchases, and the resultant widening of wealth inequality, could lead to political and social instability in the United States, saying: "The majority of people are suffering amid a Great Gatsby-style boom at the top".

Powell's expansion of credit through repo contracts, seen as a new "Greenspan put," created large profits for Wall Street investment banks. In June 2020, Jim Grant likened Powell's policy to drug dealing, calling him "the Fed's Dr. Feelgood." In a September 2020 testimony, Powell said: "Our actions were in no way an attempt to relieve pain on Wall Street". By the end of 2020, Wall Street investment banks recorded their best year in history, and Bloomberg called 2020, ".. a great year for Wall Street, but a bear market for Humans". Mohamed A. El-Erian called Powell "a follower, not a leader", of markets.

Powell defended his actions saying: "I don't know that the connection between asset purchases and financial stability is a particularly tight one", and that he wasn't worried that the Fed's actions were creating asset bubbles.

In July 2020, CNBC host Jim Cramer said, "I'm sick and tired of hearing that we're in a bubble, that Powell's overinflating the price of stocks by printing money to keep the economy moving". The Washington Post called the Fed "addicted to propping up markets, even when there is no need". In August 2020, investors Leon Cooperman and Seth Klarman warned of a dangerous "speculative bubble", with market psychology "unhinged from market fundamentals".

In August 2020, Bloomberg News called Powell's policy "exuberantly asymmetric" (echoing Alan Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" quote from 1996), and that the "Powell Put" had become more extreme than the "Greenspan Put". Steven Pearlstein in The Washington Post said that Powell had "adopted a strategy that works like a one-way ratchet, providing a floor for stock and bond prices but never a ceiling", and that any attempt by Powell to abandon this strategy "will trigger a sharp sell-off by investors who have become addicted to monetary stimulus".

By December 2020, Powell's monetary policy, measured by the Goldman Sachs US Financial Conditions Index (GSFCI), was the loosest in the history of the GSFCI (goes back to 1987), and had created simultaneous asset bubbles across most of the major asset classes in the United States: For example, in equities, in housing, and in bonds. Cryptocurrencies also saw dramatic increases in price during 2020, leading Powell to win the 2020 Forbes Person Of The Year In Crypto.

High up on his list, and sooner rather than later, will be dealing with the consequences of the biggest financial bubble in U.S. history. Why the biggest? Because it encompasses not just stocks but pretty much every other financial asset too. And for that, you may thank the Federal Reserve.

— Richard Cookson, Bloomberg (4 February 2021)

The asset price boom during the pandemic has attracted a generation of young investors who explicitly credit Powell for promoting froth in financial markets. Gathering in online communities like Reddit's r/wallstreetbets board, they discuss high-risk trades and share memes that depict "J Pow" using the Fed's money printer to flood the economy.

In December 2020, Powell defended high asset prices by invoking the controversial Fed model, saying: "Admittedly P/Es are high but that's maybe not as relevant in a world where we think the 10-year Treasury is going to be lower than it's been historically from a return perspective". The author of the Fed model, Dr. Edward Yardeni, said Powell's actions could form the greatest financial bubble in history, while the Wall Street Journal described Powell's comparison as an attempt to "rewrite the laws of investing".

In April 2021, Powell reassured concerns over a potential housing bubble, similar to the one that preceded the Great Recession. He stated, "we don't see bad loans and unsustainable prices and that kind of thing."

Evgeny Alexandrovich Chichvarkin is a Russian entrepreneur who founded the largest Russian mobile phone retailer, «Euroset». Due to this business, he became the richest man under 35 of his country, with an approximatively $1.6 billion wealth.

He has received a number of public awards including 2004 Person of the Year in the Head of Retail Business category. The winner of the Ernst & Young contest "Entrepreneur of the Year 2005" in the Nomination "Trade".

In 2006 Evgeny Alexandrovich Chichvarkin was awarded the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky "For Labor and the Fatherland" in the nomination "Industry Leader". In 2006 was awarded the Order of Glory of Russia for his great personal contribution to the development of the best traditions of Russian entrepreneurship. In 2007, at the Grand Prix of the "Person of the Year 2006" Chichvarkin was awarded the Order of Glory of the Fatherland.

He was a member of the Right Cause political party and was expected to become chairman of its Moscow section. Chichvarkin currently lives in London, from where he has campaigned against corruption in Russia and president Vladimir Putin personally.

On August 2012 he launched his new wine store Hedonism Wines on London's Davies Street.

Chichvarkin was born in Saint-Petersburg, former Leningrad, USSR in 1974, from mother Lyudmila of Russian tatar descent and father Aleksandr from Moscow. His father was a pilot and his mother was an economist working for the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade; during his childhood, the family moved to Moscow.

From 1991 to 1996 Chichvarkin studied at the State Academy of Management, as well as earning money trading on Moscow flea markets. After graduating Chichvarkin started studying for a PhD (Kandidat), which he abandoned in 1998.

In 1997 Chichvarkin and his friend Timur Artemev started a business named Yevroset to sell mobile phones. In 2002 Yevroset became one of the top three Moscow mobile phone retailers, with 92 retail outlets. The company opened 100 more outlets in 2002, 117 more outlets in 2003, 800 more outlets in 2004, 1934 more outlets in 2005, etc. In 2007 they had 5156 outlets in 12 countries: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

In June 2005, Yevroset has received the "Superbrand-2005" public award, in October 2005 "Brand of the Year / EFFIE 2005" awards and in December 2005 "The Company of the Year" in the nomination "Business Reputation". «Euroset» is holders of the Diploma of the Russian Foundation for the Protection of Consumer Rights.

21 September 2008 Evgeny Chichvarkin sold «Euroset» to Alexander Mamut, the owner of investment company ANN and internet portal "Live Journal".

In August 2005 Chichvarkin was accused of involvement in the illegal import of a $100 million shipment of mobile phones, but the accusations were eventually dropped. In March 2006 a large consignment of Motorola mobile phones shipped for Chichvarkin was seized on the pretext that their emissions of microwave radiation exceeded the levels permitted by Russian health regulations. After those cases Chichvarkin accused Russian law-enforcement agencies of corporate raiding.

In March 2007 Chichvarkin was mentioned by the media in connection with the case of Dmitry Sidorov, the founder Iled M, which was accused of large scale tax avoidance. Iled M had sold mobile phones to Yevroset as well as to other retailers. In August 2007 the apartments of many Yevroset employees were searched by police. Some experts considered the searches to be connected with the Idel M case, while other saw it as a continuation of Motorola case. Others still viewed it as a marketing ploy by Yevroset themselves (the last chance to buy their phones before they are confiscated), others as a siloviks' revenge on Chichvarkin.

In September 2008 the headquarters of Euroset were searched in connection with its handling of Andrey Vlaskin, a Yevroset employee who in 2003 stole mobile phones worth around 20 million Russian roubles (approximately US$1 million). Vlaskin was caught by Yevroset security in Tambov, moved to Moscow to a Euroset-owned apartment and after some time agreed to compensate Euroset for their losses. While between 2004 and 2007 Euroset and Vlaskin apparently had no claims on each other, in 2008 Euroset was accused of kidnapping, illegal imprisonment and extortion.

On 21 September 2008 Chichvarkin sold 100% of Euroset stock to Alexander Mamut. The volume of the transaction was US$400 million.

In January 2009 Chichvarkin moved to the United Kingdom and on 23 January 2009 on Russian federal search list in connection with the Vlaskin case. On 28 January the Basmanny Court of Moscow approved Chichvarkin's arrest (in absentia). On 12 March 2009 his details were passed to Interpol. On 13 April 2009 the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia noticed that a key investigator of Chichvarkin's case, Vladimir Knyazyev, had previously been sentenced for stealing a large consignment of mobile phones from Chichvarkin's Euroset. During the 2007 contraband case he had forged the act of destroying the phones confiscated as evidence. The investigation committee demanded the dismissal of Knyazyev because of the conflict of interest but their demands were refused. On 17 November 2010 the jury found all the defendants in the Vlaskin case not guilty.

The prosecution's appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected on 20 January 2011 and Chichvarkin's indictment was withdrawn a few days later.

His lawyer Yuri Gervis noted that Chichvarkin is still worried that he might be charged again in connection with the 2005 contraband case.

International search of Euroset Evgeny Chichvarkin has been discontinued. As reported on 25 January 2011 by an official representative of the National Central Bureau (NCB) of Interpol at the Interior Ministry Olga Shklyarov, it is due to the termination of criminal proceedings against Chichvarkin under Article 24 of the Code (the absence of a crime).

While in London Chichvarkin has participated in protests highlighting the dangers of conducting business in Russia, referring to the cases of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Sergei Magnitsky. He is aware of being observed by "men with russian behaviour".

In 2014 he started warning of multiple wars if Putin's Russia is not stopped by the western world. In 2019 he accused Putin of steering Russia into a war with non-existent enemies.

Since March 2012, together with his friend Timur Artemyev, they opened the Hedonism Drinks Ltd wine business in London, where Artemyev is the owner of the company, and Chichvarkin is the main investor. In the autumn of 2012, Chichvarkin opened an elite store "Hedonism Wines" with the corresponding [specify] design on 700 m² in the prestigious Mayfair area of ​​London, before that preparations were underway for two years. Chichvarkin initially planned that the average price of a bottle in his store would be 200 pounds, but then he was persuaded to sell wine at a price of 10 pounds.

In the spring of 2018, on Piccadilly Street, together with Artemiev and chef Olli Daboo, he opened the Hide restaurant, which received one star from the Michelin restaurant guide. In 2017, the store's revenue grew by 37% year-on-year to £20.7m, while net income nearly quintupled to £1.6m.

The DAO (stylized Đ) was a digital decentralized autonomous organization, and a form of investor-directed venture capital fund. It launched in April 2016 after a crowdfunding campaign via a token sale and it became one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns in history.

The DAO had an objective to provide a new decentralized business model for organizing both commercial and non-profit enterprises. It was instantiated on the Ethereum blockchain, and had no conventional management structure or board of directors. The code of the DAO is open-source.

In June 2016, users exploited a vulnerability in The DAO code to enable them to siphon off one-third of The DAO's funds to a subsidiary account. The Ethereum community controversially decided to hard-fork the Ethereum blockchain to restore virtually all funds to the original contract. This split the Ethereum blockchain into two branches, each with its own cryptocurrency, where the original unforked blockchain continued as Ethereum Classic.

By September 2016, the value token of The DAO, known by the moniker DAO, was delisted from major cryptocurrency exchanges (such as Poloniex and Kraken) and had, in effect, become defunct.

The open source computer code behind the organization was written principally by Christoph Jentzsch, and released publicly on GitHub, where other contributors added to and modified the code. Simon Jentzsch, Christoph Jentzsch's brother, was also involved in the venture.

The DAO was launched on 30 April 2016 at 01:42:58 AM +UTC on Ethereum Block 1428757, with a website and a 28-day crowdsale to fund the organization. The token sale had raised more than US$34 million by 10 May 2016, and more than US$50 million-worth of Ether (ETH)—the digital value token of the Ethereum network—by 12 May, and over US$100 million by 15 May 2016. On 17 May 2016, the largest investor in the DAO held less than 4% of all DAO tokens and the top 100 holders held just over 46% of all DAO tokens. The fund's Ether value as of 21 May 2016 was more than US$150 million, from more than 11,000 investors.

As of May 2016, The DAO had attracted nearly 14% of all ether tokens issued to date.

On 28 May 2016 the DAO tokens became tradable on various cryptocurrency exchanges.

A paper published in May 2016 noted a number of security vulnerabilities associated with The DAO, and recommended that investors in The DAO hold off from directing The DAO to invest in projects until the problems had been resolved. An Ethereum developer on GitHub pointed out a flaw relating to "recursive calls". On June 9th it was blogged about by Peter Vessenes, founder of the Blockchain Foundation. By June 14, fixes had been proposed and were awaiting approval by members of The DAO.

On June 16th, further attention was called to recursive call vulnerabilities by bloggers affiliated with the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies & Contracts (IC3).

On June 17, 2016, the DAO was subjected to an attack exploiting a combination of vulnerabilities, including the one concerning recursive calls, that resulted in the transfer of 3.6 million Ether - around a third of the 11.5 million Ether that had been committed to The DAO - valued at the time at around $50M. The funds were moved into an account subject to a 28-day holding period under the terms of the Ethereum smart contract so were not actually gone.

Members of The DAO and the Ethereum community debated what to do next, with some calling the attack a valid but unethical maneuver, others calling for the Ether to be re-appropriated, and some calling for The DAO to be shut down. Eventually[when?], the Ethereum network was hard forked to move the funds in The DAO to a recovery address where they could be exchanged back to Ethereum by their original owners. However, some continued to use the original unforked Ethereum blockchain, now called Ethereum Classic.

In September 2016, Poloniex de-listed DAO trading pairs, followed by Kraken in December 2016.

The DAO was a decentralized autonomous organization that exists as a set of contracts that resides on the Ethereum blockchain; it did not have a physical address, nor people in formal management roles. The original theory underlying the DAO was that by removing delegated power from directors and placing it directly in the hands of owners the DAO removed the ability of directors and fund managers to misdirect and waste investor funds.

As a blockchain-enabled organization, The DAO claimed to be completely transparent: everything was done by the code, which anyone could see and audit. However, the complexity of the code base and the rapid deployment of the DAO meant that the intended behavior of the organization and its actual behavior differed in serious ways that weren't apparent until after the attack occurred.

The DAO was intended to operate as "a hub that disperses funds (currently in Ether, the Ethereum value token) to projects". Investors received voting rights by means of a digital share token; they vote on proposals that are submitted by "contractors" and a group of volunteers called "curators" check the identity of people submitting proposals and make sure the projects are legal before "whitelisting" them. The profits from the investments will then flow back to its stakeholders.

The DAO did not hold the money of investors; instead, the investors owned DAO tokens that gave them rights to vote on potential projects. Anyone could pull out their funds until the time they first voted.

The DAO's reliance on Ether allowed people to send their money to it from anywhere in the world without providing any identifying information.

In order to provide an interface with real-world legal structures, the founders of The DAO established a Swiss-based company, DAO.Link, registered as a Société à responsabilité limitée (SARL) in Switzerland, apparently co-founded by Slock.it and Neuchatel-based digital currency exchange Bity SA. According to Jentzsch, DAO.Link was in Switzerland because Swiss law allowed it to "take money from an unknown source as long as you know where it's going."

In May 2016, TechCrunch described The DAO as "a paradigm shift in the very idea of economic organization. It offers complete transparency, total shareholder control, unprecedented flexibility, and autonomous governance."

In May 2016, the plan called for The DAO to invest Ether in ventures it would back (contractors) and to receive in return "clear payment terms" from contractors. The organizers of the DAO promoted the DAO as providing investors in the DAO a return on their investment via those "clear payment terms" and they warned investors there is "significant risk" that the ventures funded by the DAO may fail.

Risks included unknown attack vectors and programming errors. Additional risks noted included the lack of precedence in regulatory and corporate law; how governments and their regulatory agencies would treat The DAO and contracts it made was unknown. There was also a risk that there would be no corporate veil protecting investors from individual legal and financial liability for actions taken by The DAO and by contractors in which The DAO invested. It was unclear if The DAO was selling securities, and if it was, what type of securities those might be.

Additionally, to function in the real world, contractors would likely need to convert the invested Ether into real-world currencies. In May 2016, attorney Andrew Hinkes said that those sales of Ether would be likely to depress the value of Ether.

The code behind The DAO had several safeguards that aimed to prevent its creators or anyone else from mechanically gaming the voting of shareholders to win investments. However, this would not prevent the making of fraudulent profitability projections, and in addition, a paper cited a "number of security vulnerabilities".

On 25 July 2017, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission published a report on initial coin offerings (ICOs) and The DAO, examining "whether The DAO and associated entities and individuals violated federal securities laws with unregistered offers and sales of DAO Tokens in exchange for 'Ether,' a virtual currency." The SEC concluded that DAO tokens sold on the Ethereum blockchain were securities and therefore possible violations of U.S. securities laws.