25 projects will be shut down, is the king of DeFi going to "run away"?

On March 6, Anton Nell, senior solution architect at Fantom, posted on his personal social media platform that YFI founders Andre Cronje (AC) and Anton Nell have decided not to continue contributing to the DeFi and Crypto fields, and the 25 protocols they developed will cease operations on April 3.

Recently, the community has been talking about "Defi cannot be without AC (Andre Cronje)". Who is AC and why did he "run away"? As early as AC's early days, Vernacular Blockchain published an article "4 projects in 4 months, is AC the "King of DeFi" or a "scumbag" who has trapped many people?" to introduce him. He is the founder of YFI. He became popular because of the YFI (Uncle) he initiated. He is known as the "King of DeFi". He is also known as a "scumbag" because he launched 4 well-known projects in less than 4 months in the early days.

Since AC released too many projects, many people didn’t realize that there were as many as 25 until AC was about to “retire”. In the eyes of some people, the “scumbag” may have deserved the title, but more people are grateful for AC’s contribution to the DeFi ecosystem. Taking this opportunity, let’s review AC’s legendary history and his early well-known projects... (The following content is from the historical article review)

01
Yearn.finance(YFI) and AC

There is no need to say much about YFI. Now most people in the industry know it. Just looking at the endless series of imitations and aggregator imitations after YFI, you can know how popular YFI is. An important indicator to measure whether a project is good or not is how many imitators appear after it.

Baihua has published two articles before ("YFI 10,000 times in 43 days: How much you understand, how much you can earn? Is it overvalued or undervalued now?" and "YFI 10,000 times in 43 days: Its core business tells you how to play the second half of DeFi"), which specifically explain YFI. I will not repeat the specific business content here. However, as AC's first masterpiece, I still have to mention it here, mainly to talk about AC himself and the recent situation of YFI.

Many readers know AC through YFI, but AC’s earliest fame was not due to YFI. When ICOs were popular, he was the Code Review columnist for the Cryptobriefing website. As an old leeks in the circle at that time, the 1CO project reviews of Cryptobriefing and the Code reviews written by AC were basically must-reads .

Simply put, AC had a bit of a golden finger flavor at the time. If AC said that a project's code was good, the project might not necessarily become popular, but if it said that the code was bad, the project was basically doomed to fail .

The famous work I remember was the Code Review of Holochain in 2018. At that time, the industry had not heard of it much, and few people understood it. The conclusion given by AC was: "This is something entirely new, and it isn't a blockchain, this is a new kind of decentralized beast, but I love it." Later, Holochain went online and the price soared. Although the mining machine was delayed and the popularity was no longer there, many bigwigs in the industry are still very optimistic about the concept and direction of Holochain.

Interestingly, AC did not study computer science at university, but law. Does it remind you of Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap? He studied mechanical engineering at university. The two most dazzling stars in the entire DeFi circle this year are not from professional backgrounds.

AC has actually participated in multiple projects, including BitDiem, Aggero, ION, etc., but the only ones retained on his LinkedIn are Fantom (technical consultant) and YFI, the first project he created. After talking about AC, let’s talk about YFI .

YFI has not performed well recently, or the entire DeFi circle is a bit sluggish. And YFI can basically be regarded as the "barometer" of DeFi. As an aggregator, when Defi has "big profits", YFI can naturally absorb more funds, and its own price will rise with the tide. When the market is not good, the opposite is naturally true . At present, the liquidity mining generally has low returns. The price of CRV, an important support for YFI, has plummeted. Aggregators such as Harvest have been hacked, and DeFi composability has begun to be threatened by Layer2. A series of events are considered negative events for the aggregator industry headed by YFI.

02
Eminence.finance (EMN)

If YFI is AC's masterpiece that made it famous, EMN can be regarded as AC's masterpiece that was "hacked" .

EMN was born in September 2020 when NFT suddenly became popular. At that time, the popularity of liquidity mining decreased slightly, and NFT suddenly became popular. Many people believed that it would become the next outlet to "take over DeFi". AC also posted a concept of Gamefi on Twitter, which is a combination of game + DEFI + NFT .

This concept has also brought several Gamefi projects into the spotlight, including MEME, Aavegotchi (GHST), and Dego. DeFi players will definitely be familiar with these names.

EMN can be simply understood as a GHST-like project based on YFI.

There is nothing wrong with the main network test itself, but when combined with AC's fame and his style of tweeting, there is a problem...

AC liked two tweets about EMN in a row. Then a group of investors bought EMN crazily after seeing the tweets. However, this was essentially just a test contract, and it had not been audited at all. Sure enough, the hacker found a loophole the next day and stole $15 million using the loophole, and EMN went straight to zero.

The most interesting thing is that the hacker also transferred 8 million dollars of the stolen 15 million dollars into Andre’s contract address, directly putting half of the blame on AC, and successfully drawing public attention to AC. As expected, a group of "rights activists pointed the finger at AC, believing that he needed to be responsible for the incident, and attacked AC in various media, and some even issued death threats.

AC sent several tweets to explain the situation and apologize, returned $8 million to the users who suffered losses (almost every user recovered about 30-40% of the funds), and stated that his Twitter and Ethereum address would not mention any new projects in the future.

03
Liquidity Income (LBI)

LBI is a project dedicated to solving the pain points of DeFi liquidity mining. Through liquidity-based inflation tokens, the impermanent losses common in DeFi mining can be eliminated through liquidity governance.

The specific implementation method will not be elaborated here. Readers who want to know can search it by themselves. But to understand LBI, you must first understand the basic concepts such as the first pool, the second pool, and the algorithm formula of AMM. Otherwise, to understand a DeFi project, the threshold is much higher than the earliest BTC, LTC, and EOS public chain era.

LBI did not experience any hacker attacks, but the result was not much different from EMN. The only difference was that this time scientists entered the market early by calling the contract address posted by AC at the end of the article, driving up the price of LBI, thereby triggering fomo, and then sold a large number of tokens at high prices when retail investors entered the market, and a group of retail investors were trapped .

AC’s own Medium article clearly pointed out that LBI is just an experimental concept to help developers conceive a better way to distribute tokens. It is worthless in itself, and it is not worthless in the sense of “no economic value” like YFI or MEME before. It is really “worthless ”…

Although there were articles clarifying the matter, some people were trapped after all, so the popularity of AC and YFI continued to decline due to the LBI incident.

04
Keep3r Network（KPR）

After that, AC launched his new project Keep3r Network (KPR). With the previous experience of EMN and LBI, AC learned a lot and did not publish any information related to the project on Twitter and Medium. However, this still did not bother the scientist. After he deployed the test contract of KRP, speculators still found the address of the project through his Github and started to charge money, which once raised the token price by more than 20 times.

I never thought that this was really just a beta version. Every time AC fixed a bug or deployed something new, it would redeploy a new contract, withdraw funds from the old contract, and follow the new contract. The token of the old contract would naturally return to zero...

Just like that, after several "wolf cry" version changes, we seem to have finally ushered in the official Beta version of KPR.

Within a few hours after AC posted the tweet, the price of this Beta token was hyped up by the crazy crowd and increased by 100 times . This shows that even after the impact of EMN and LBI returning to zero and the sharp drop in the price of YFI, AC is still the undisputed "Internet celebrity" in the Defi world.

So what exactly is the Keep3r project used for?

Simply put, Keep3r Network is a decentralized trigger network (on-chain service outsourcing network) .

Take the first task of the current Beta version, Uniswap V2 Oracle, for example. It requires users to collect the sliding average price of Uniswap trading pairs, or in other words, this Job provides price oracle services on the Uniswap chain.

A friend who is proficient in Ethereum commented on Keep3r, saying that it is a new thing. When you become a Keeper in the network, you become a robot, script, other contract or just an EOA (Ethereum external account) that triggers events. This can submit signed TX on behalf of a third party, call transactions at a specific time, or more complex functions.

Many readers may wonder why it is necessary to delegate to Keeper to automatically trigger the contract? This involves a smart contract design problem of ETH and the current mainstream public chain, that is, smart contracts cannot be executed automatically, and someone needs to call it to trigger (obtain data). For example, Chainlink's price feed node acts as this trigger.

At the same time, even this triggering cannot be guaranteed at present. It is said that Dfinity has made many improvements in this regard. The code is always activated through high hardware costs to ensure triggering. However, we have to wait until the main network is launched to see the results.

So when Keep3r Network appears, the Keeper inside it can act as the trigger and become a decentralized work outsourcing network, which may take over the miscellaneous work of various platforms. This will definitely give birth to new gameplay for the contract combination type of DeFi, so it is still worth looking forward to.

In AC's original words, KPR allows us to build DAPPs that were previously impossible. The KPR network currently includes three systems: 1. MetaWallet 2. Unihedge. 3. Undisclosed.

The first system: Metawallet (a wallet that does not require Gas). You can sign the operations of sending, transferring, approving, executing, etc. on ETH, and then queue them in the KPR network. Keeper will submit them in batches on your behalf. The more users there are, the cheaper the system will be. You can complete these transactions almost without spending Gas. The KPR network can submit as many sub-transactions as possible in a single ETH transaction as GAS allows, which feels a bit like transaction batching.

The second system: UniHedge, AC only introduced two components, Uniquote and Uniswap V2 Oracle. They constitute a oracle price feed system similar to the following.

The third system: Still waiting for AC’s latest Medium article introduction…

Currently, many big Vs on Twitter are praising KPR. Some say that KPR is like an army of outsourced ACs to maintain your DeFi platform. It is as important to the DeFi ecosystem as Chainlink. Some say that KPR is the best presentation of DeFi primitives: reducing complexity, reducing scope, and simplifying governance...