Andre Cronje, Legendary DeFi Builder, Is Leaving Crypto

Key Takeaways

• Andre Cronje and Anton Nell are leaving the DeFi space.
• The pair will handing over ownership or decommissioning the websites they control, but the protocols they built will continue to run.
• YFI, KP3R, and FTM have dipped on the news.

Cronje was widely regarded as the “Godfather of DeFi” for his various contributions to the space. 

Andre Cronje, Anton Nell Bow Out 

The DeFi space is losing two of its most talented developers. 

Andre Cronje, the self-styled “DeFi architect” who rose to prominence as the founder of the yield optimization protocol Yearn.Finance, is moving away from DeFi and crypto for good. Anton Nell, another builder best known for his ties to the Fantom ecosystem, will also be bowing out with Cronje. Nell broke the news in a Sunday tweet. “Andre and I have decided that we are closing the chapter of contibuting [sic.] to the defi/crypto space,” Nell wrote, before adding that it was “a decision that has been coming for a while now.” Nell, who worked closely with Cronje across his various projects, explained that the pair would be shutting down the websites they control and stepping away from the space. Prior to working on Fantom, Nell had a brief stint reviewing ICO projects for Crypto Briefing alongside Cronje. 

Andre and I have decided that we are closing the chapter of contibuting to the defi/crypto space.

There are around ~25 apps and services that we are terminating on 03 April 2022.

1/3

— Anton Nell (@AntonNellCrypto) March 6, 2022

Questions surrounding Cronje’s future in crypto started surfacing this week when he deleted his Twitter account and amended his LinkedIn profile to indicate that he had stopped working on Yearn.Finance, Fantom, and the broader Ethereum ecosystem. He later confirmed to the Keep3r Network community that he would be leaving the project in a Telegram message. 

Cronje, who had a big impact on Crypto Briefing‘s early years as Chief Code Reviewer prior to his various DeFi engagements, confirmed the news and reiterated that the protocols he and Nell built would continue to run (notably, as they are deployed as immutable smart contracts, there’s no way to shut them down). Writing in a private message to Crypto Briefing, Cronje said that they “are simply transferring/decommissioning the domains and webapps we control, and moving away from defi/crypto.” Cronje said that the pair would be returning to their careers in the traditional finance sector. 

YFI, KP3R, FTM Hit Hard

The pseudonymous Yearn.Finance developer banteg weighed in on the news, clarifying that Cronje “hasn’t worked on [Yearn] for over a year… And even if he did, there are 50 full-time people and 140 part-time contributors to back things up.” 

For the few years they were active, both Cronje and Nell made an immeasurable impact on DeFi. Cronje was sometimes described as a “Godfather of DeFi” after popularizing the yield farming trend at the helm of Yearn.Finance, which amassed a cult following thanks in part to the astronomical rise of the YFI token over a period crypto diehards refer to as “DeFi summer.” Cronje later went on to build a suite of popular products on Ethereum and other EVM-compatible blockchains. Cronje became notorious for his “test in prod” mantra as he typically deployed projects on the blockchain ahead of conducting audits. 

Most recently, Cronje had led Solidly, a new Fantom project inspired by Curve Finance’s vote-escrowed tokenomics and OlympusDAO’s “(3,3)” flywheel design. Solidly recently launched on Fantom and attracted billions of dollars in liquidity to the network. 

Reactions to the update have been mixed, though many active crypto users expressed their thanks and support to the pair. Most of the projects they were affiliated with, meanwhile, have suffered. Yearn.Finance’s YFI is down 7.5% today, Keep3r’s KP3R has dropped 24.4%, and even FTM is down 14.4%. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH, CRV, FTM and had exposure to YFI in a cryptocurrency index. Andre Cronje is an equity holder in Crypto Briefing, and previously worked at the publication with Anton Nell.  

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What are Andre Cronje and Daniele Sestagalli collaborating on?

DeFi

A series of cryptic tweets from top DeFi developers is hinting at a big new project coming into the Fantom ecosystem very soon.

Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate

Daniele Sestagalli of Wonderland fame tweeted on January 5th the incoming launch of a new coin as part of a collaboration with veteran DeFi software developer Andre Cronje.

If you’re asking, me and Andre are launching a new coin on #fantom and it will start Fantom Season! We started here, is natural we now come back to growth the ecosystem and tech that made me who I am today. 🙏

— Daniele 🐸✊ (@danielesesta) January 5, 2022

Just earlier this week, Cronje himself tweeted out that he was “deploying a new experiment on Fantom this month.”

I'm deploying a new experiment on Fantom this month

— Andre Cronje 👻🐸 (@AndreCronjeTech) January 1, 2022

Background

Both men are no strangers to the world of DeFi. Sestagalli maintains an active social media presence with the #frognation community and is the brain behind several high-profile protocols. He first rose to prominence with the launch of Wonderland on the Avalanche blockchain, an OlympusDAO fork. Soon after, he launched the wildly successful stablecoin issuance protocol Abracadabra that has overtaken MakerDAO in revenue. His latest project is Popsicle Finance, a multichain yield aggregator.

Cronje is best known for founding the blue-chip DeFi protocol Yearn Finance and the lesser-known DevOps automation Keep3rV1 protocol. Cronje is also closely linked with Fantom, having served as chairperson of the Fantom Foundation’s Technology Council and a technical advisor to Fantom for the past 3-4 years.

 What is in the works?

What could two of the brightest minds in DeFi be building? At this point, all we know is that the project would be launched on the Fantom blockchain, which has been seeing a surge in TVL and the price of its native token FTM lately. As with Sestagalli’s other protocols, the new project is also likely to tie in with the existing #frognation ecosystem.

Based on a Medium post by Cronje, the upcoming project involves some variation of the prisoner’s dilemma game theory that usage was popularized by DeFi 2.0 protocol Olympus DAO, merged with the vested escrow concept pioneered by Curve Finance.

Users will be incentivized to stake and lock their token, of which there would be an overall diminishing emission effect by the protocol (thereby attracting early birds but deterring latecomers). However, the longer users stake their holdings, the more incentives they would receive when new tokens are minted by the protocol:

“Assume 1,000,000 weekly emission, a total_supply of 20,000,000, and a locked_supply of 10,000,000. This would mean that 1,000,000 new tokens are minted and provided as incentives, a 5% supply increase. Our goal is to ensure that ve lockers are never diluted, as such, ve lockers have their holdings increased by 5%.”

Finally, token stakers receive a “lock” for staking their tokens – similar to a liquidity provider token – which would be a non-fungible asset in itself that can be traded on secondary markets.

Another tweet by Cronje on the 3rd of January indicates that the tokenomics of the upcoming project is allocated 100% to the public community.

pic.twitter.com/UDhxU9oI40

— Andre Cronje 👻🐸 (@AndreCronjeTech) January 3, 2022

This suggests that the project would be heavily decentralized, and could allude some form of a fan/social token that will come in the form of an airdrop.

It may also be tied to a Metaverse or NFT-related project. This is not out of the realm of possibility in light of the Fantom Foundation’s recent expansion of its ongoing $370 million liquidity mining incentives to GameFi projects.

For a more comprehensive analysis, see the following tweet by @JackNieworld.

ve(3,3) could change DeFi forever. @andrecronje, @danielesesta, and @FantomFDN have banded together to create a new, secretive, and highly anticipated project.

Here's a thread of everything we know (and some speculation) on the protocol:

Also, how to play the trade: 🧵👇

— Jack Niewold (@JackNiewold) January 11, 2022

Exciting things ahead for Fantom

At the time of writing, crypto is going further into a bear market as BTC dipped 9% in the last 24 hours to $42,683. Despite that, Fantom seems to be one Layer-1 that is defying this price trend, with FTM surging 27.23% in the past week to $2.74. This surge is a continuation of FTM’s bull run in the past month that has seen a rise of over 132% since 20th December 2021, setting FTM apart as a big gainer from other top market cap coins.

Fantom’s other growth metrics also indicate that big things are happening on its chain. TVL has risen from $3.81 billion to $5.71 billion within the span of 2-3 weeks. Its unique addresses have enjoyed a relatively linear growth, almost doubling from 832,000 at the start of October to 1.5 million as of January. Daily transactions have dwindled to the range of 500,000 to 900,000 from an all-time high of 1.8 million in 12th September but still remains higher than before September.

As Sestagalli and Cronje gear up to their big announcement, the Fantom ecosystem may see a further boost in activity.

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