The end of the godfather of DeFi

Andre Cronje (AC), a young man who is proficient in Afrikaans, German, Latin, and English, loves boxing and weightlifting, and has switched careers from law to development, has entered the DeFi field in just 4 years after entering the encryption industry It has become the "Godfather of DeFi" among many people. In two years, dozens of smash hit DeFi applications have been launched.

At the beginning of this year, AC launched Solidly with a high profile. As a conceptual product of DeFi2.0, it has been sought after by many investors once it was launched. AC has driven the rapid rise of Fantom's entire ecological TVL, while Solidly is in full swing. However, he suddenly jumped out of the spotlight and announced his permanent withdrawal from the encryption circle, leaving investors with surprised faces. These ups and downs of the story gave AC a sense of sight as the protagonist of a novel.

Like Musk, Andre Cronje is originally from South Africa, where he started his career.

By chance, after AC completed a computer-related course, just in time for one of the team's lecturers to resign, he successfully became a course lecturer after applying. From then on, he stepped into the computer industry step by step. science field. After that, it taught students various computer subjects, but it went around and only worked in a number of financial technology companies in South Africa.

Until 2018, AC began to record his code learning process and results on social media, and opened his own column on the encrypted media Crypto Briefing, and began to evaluate the code of encrypted projects. Since then, the name Andre Cronje has also begun to move towards public view.

From 2018 to 2019, Andre Cronje has been operating his own column on the Crypto platform, and has successively published code analysis on Lightstreams, IRIS Network, Arweave, Ankr, Cosmos and many other projects, and his articles also have cheat-like myths, Many of these projects have shined in subsequent performances, and he has also been sought after by many fans.

Andre Cronje, who gained fame during this period, began to participate deeply in many projects such as CryptoCurve, ION, Fantom, BitDiem, Aggero, FUSBLockchain, etc., and became an analyst or technical consultant for these projects.

After that, more and more enthusiasts began to use AC's analysis as an investment guide, which made him very uncomfortable. At first, he just wanted to share his experience and learning results, and did not want to give investment guidance, so on June 10, 2019 After updating the code evaluation about COSMOS, I never published my own evaluation articles on the Crypto Briefing platform.

After a period of vacancy, AC put all its energy on the construction of Fanton, writing reports for the Fantom Foundation, researching the Token model, building Opera virtual machines, planning Fantom products and development routes, etc., and continued until 2019 the end of the year.

At the beginning of the next year, the crypto market, which had been suffering for two years in a bear market, began to show signs of recovery. At this time, AC also started its famous work - the construction of yearn.Finance, which was also called iearn.finance at this time. For this project, AC can be said to have given everything, except for the development cost of 42,000 US dollars, Auditing and escrow also cost him twice the cost of his original plan. For this, he had to mortgage his house and owe about $20,000 in debt, but this is nothing compared to the future benefits.

After its launch, yearn did not attract widespread attention in the industry. It was not until July 2020, when yearn officially launched liquidity mining and launched the governance token YFI, with an annualized return of up to 750%, that yearn began to become a real hit. The price of YFI tokens soared from $34 to $30,000 in a few weeks, sweeping the encryption market, so there were such stories as "43 days skyrocketed by more than 10,000 times", "Bitcoin's 8-year market in 30 days" and so on. statement.

As the first DeFi aggregator created by AC, yearn.finance pioneered the concept of machine gun pool, coupled with the token design of no pre-mining, no investment institutions, and no team rewards, it has been wildly sought after by the cryptocurrency community and has become It became the strongest dark horse in 2020, which also made AC famous.

Afterwards, under the leadership of AC, the community team successively integrated insurance, options, NFT and other related strategies, and the subsequent updates made many investors believe that yearn has unlimited possibilities, and AC's influence in the circle is gradually showing. So that after he posted a tweet praising ERC1155, the ENJ token jumped nearly 20 points in response.

At the same time that yearn and AC achieved each other, AC, the DeFi development maniac, had begun to aim at a new direction. It was also at this time that AC began to be questioned by some community members because of some personal behaviors.

In September 2020, AC liked the tweet about Eminence.finance (EMN) twice in a row on Twitter. After speculators saw AC’s like, a large amount of funds poured into the EMN address, but at this time the EMN contract had not passed security audit. As a result, the hacker used the contract loophole to steal nearly 15 million U.S. dollars of funds, and the EMN was almost zero. The hacker even put 8 million U.S. dollars into Andre's contract address, and naturally pointed the finger at AC.

Shortly after the EMN incident, AC introduced the newly designed token model LBI in his Medium, and this time, the "scientists" entered the market in advance by calling the contract address posted by AC at the end of the article, and the price of LBI was greatly hyped. High, and when ordinary retail investors enter the market, "scientists" sell at a high level, and the result is a collapse in currency prices.

The following Keep3r Network also had a similar plot. At this time, community members began to question AC’s one after another operation, and AC also began to get bored with the community’s demands. At this time, it even said that it would quit the circle, but described DeFi as the coolest toy. He who is "Money Lego" has not really wanted to quit at this time.

In the subsequent bull market in 2021, AC launched cross-chain Multichain, Chainlist, Cream Finance, Rarity and other projects one after another, all of which became well-known and sought-after projects at that time.

At the beginning of 2022, AC, who returned from vacation, began to publicize his Ve (3.3) concept. After that, the Solidly product was launched smoothly. Many people regarded it as the pinnacle of DeFi2.0. The appearance of Solidly ignited the enthusiasm of all Fantom projects. In addition to SolidlyTVL exceeding 2.3 billion US dollars, the TVL on the chain also reached a high of 12 billion US dollars, but no one expected that less than a month after the launch of the project, its core developer and soul figure AC had withdrawn.

On March 6, Anton Nell, Senior Solution Architect of Fantom, announced on social media that Andre Cronje and him decided not to continue contributing to the DeFi and Crypto fields. The operation was suspended on the 3rd, and one stone caused a thousand waves.

Most of the tokens in the Fantom ecosystem fell sharply that day, Solidly fell by 70%, Spookyswap fell by 19%, LiquidDriver fell by 17%, Tomb fell by 22%, and Geist Finance fell by 15%. The entire Fantom ecosystem was devastated. In just one day, the TVL on the Fantom chain plummeted from a high of 12.09 billion to 7.13 billion, a drop of as much as 41%.

As a result, some investors angrily criticized "AC "rug pull and run away", irresponsible to users and investors."

As for the reason for AC's exit, many people speculate that it was due to Daniele's exit from Solidly. Daniele is also a soul in the DeFi field. He is the founder of Frog Nation. In the plan, Daniele is in charge of Solidly's public relations, and AC is in charge of development, but Afterwards, a fire broke out in Daniele’s backyard and he had to quit Solidly, so AC could only deal with two jobs of PR and development alone. For a company that once compared the community to"poison"For those who were almost forced to quit the circle by the community, it was obviously difficult for AC to take over Daniele's work, and finally chose to launch it completely.

This kind of speculation is open to question, because in terms of AC's influence, it is possible to find a replacement for Daniele, and it is not necessary to give up the pick, so there must be other factors. But compared to the reason for his withdrawal, everyone pays more attention to the handling of these DeFi endgames. Fortunately, many people have picked up these fallen torches, whether it is Fantom, Multichain, Chainlist and other projects, or the original team continues to develop, or It's the new team that takes over the front end, and that's the beauty of DeFi.

Two years ago, AC said in a podcast, "Every morning I wake up, I will be excited to type code, come up with new ideas, add new things to the entire ecosystem, as long as it can be realized, I will continue to do it ", I don't know if he still remembers this sentence now.