Andre Cronje, a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) software engineer, also known as the ‘godfather’ of DeFi, has quitted DeFi arena after deactivating his Twitter account. In Sunday’s tweet, Anton Nell who was long-time colleague of Andre at the Fantom Foundation stated that he was also quitting. This news has led to falling in price in Fantom around 20% and in Yearn Finance nearly 10%.

Andre Cronje was also a technical adviser of Fantom Foundation which is a layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution, a finance founder of Yearn Finance, and creator of Keep3rV1 protocols. In DeFi, Andre Cronje has been one of the most influential characters since its rise to prominence within the crypto arena. Through mergers and partnerships, he is involved in other significant decentralized financial operations. At CryptoBriefing he was a code reviewer and a shareholder.

Due to security flaws, the user funds disappear from liquidity pools. Andre Cronje’s new project faced lot of criticism. Days after this Andre Cronje left. There was another announcement that 25 decentralized applications (DApps) and services they have been operating up to now on the Fantom platform would close down on 3rd April 2022. Yearn Finance, keep3r.network, multichain.xyz, chainlist.org, bribe.crv.finance, and the new solidly.exchange are among the affected apps.

Last week Andre deleted all his tweets from his account. Later he fully deactivated his tweeter account. To do marketing for Cronje’s latest new project, Solidly, Dani Sesta was signed who was Core member of Wonderland (TIME) and Abracadabra.money (MIM). But later to deal with the crisis at Wonderlan, Sesta could not continue in Solidly and had to step down which led Andre to become the face of the project. Solidly this new project went live on 24th February which hit $2.24 billion in total value locked in three days.

On Monday Fantom CEO Michael Kong tweeted assuring customers that though Andre was an essential part of the team, many of the projects founded by Cronje are not closing even after Cronje’s and Nell’s stepping down. Some of these projects were working independently for many years, will be a development in the upcoming era. He supported his claim saying Andre has contributed to the project for only a year. They also have 50 full-time employees and 140 part-time contributors.

 Lead developer at Yearn.finance, Banteg claimed and explained to users and investors that the day-to-day operation of the DeFi yield aggregator led Andre to quit. In a Sunday, market analyst The DeFi Edge twitted lamenting his leaving that “Andre Cronje is the Godfather of DeFi”.

Effect of news on the price:

Just after the tweet was done by Nell, the price of Yearn (YFI) and Fantom (FTM) went down. As per record, currently, YFI is down about 10% to $18,187 and FTM is down 20% to $1.33. Total value locked (TVL) at Yearn is $3 billion. While since 3rd March, Fantom TVL is down 40%. According to DefiLlama, Cronje’s latest project Solidly showed TVL dropped 68% since Thursday to $735 million today.

Indrani bose

CBW - External Analyst

INDIA