Let you know Andre Cronje, the "Satoshi of DeFi" for the last time

On March 6, 2022, a blockbuster piece of information came out of the crypto industry. According to Fantom senior solution architect Anton Nell on social media, Andre Cronje and he have decided not to continue contributing to the DeFi and Crypto fields. At the same time, the 25 protocols developed by the two will cease operations on April 3. Among them, the projects worth paying attention to are: Yearn Finance, Keep3r Network, Multichain , Chainlist, Solidly and Bribe crv Finance.

As one of the most "productive" developers in the DeFi field, Andre Cronje is almost known to everyone in the crypto industry. Let Planet Jun (ID: o-daily) take you to get to know this " Satoshi Nakamoto of DeFi" again.

Who is Andre Cronje?

Andre Cronje is a software developer and cryptocurrency /DeFi (decentralized finance ) entrepreneur from South Africa. He is also the founder of the famous Ethereum protocol Yearn Finance.

It is worth mentioning that Andre Cronje has participated in many well-known DeFi projects, such as Akropolish, Cover , Cream V2, Pickle , PowerPool and Sushiswap . He is known as one of the most influential people in the DeFi field.

On his LinkedIn page, Andre Cronje humorously describes himself:

"All that stands between me and a super villain is a lab accident... Honestly, that lab accident really needs to happen soon..."

Background information about Andre Cronje

According to Andre Cronje's LinkedIn profile, we see that he graduated from Stellenbosch University in 2003 with a Bachelor of Laws degree, studied Computer Science and Information Systems at the Computer Training Institute (CTI) in 2005, and then stayed at the school as a lecturer from June 2005 to September 2006.

After leaving CTI, Andre Cronje began to participate in a lot of technical projects. He served as the technical team leader of African mobile communications company Vodacom (October 2006-December 2008), mobile project developer of Mapplications (September 2009-June 2010), and software architect of Full Facing (August 2013-July 2015).

It was only in recent years that Andre Cronje started working in the cryptocurrency industry, initially as a blockchain protocol consultant at BitDiem (March 2018 - September 2018), then as a blockchain infrastructure engineer at CryptoCurve (April 2018 - March 2019) and as a technical analyst at Lemniscap (June 2018 - June 2019).

CoinMarketCap once summarized Andre Cronje’s career before Yearn Finance:

Before delving into the mobile security and encryption industries, Andre Cronje first worked in the telecommunications industry, mainly responsible for big data development, high transaction infrastructure, etc., and worked in the field of building customized fintech solutions for five years. He used blockchain technology to provide cost-reducing financial products to the unbanked sectors in Africa.

As of May 5, 2021, Andre Cronje has worked and held positions in multiple crypto organizations, including DeFi architect at the Ethereum Foundation and architect at Yearn Finance.

“Satoshi Nakamoto of DeFi”

In a previous interview with Paradigm , Andre Cronje said that he transitioned from the fintech industry to the blockchain field. He said:

“. . . I started out teaching at CTI, then building telecom systems (GGSN, ISN) at Vodacom, then building cellular networks in Africa and started moving into big data, neural networks, then fintech, and from there naturally into blockchain, first as a researcher and finally as an engineer.”

In 2016-2017, Andre Cronje was attracted by decentralized distributed ledger technology because it promised to solve problems faced in areas such as mesh computer networks, big data, and machine learning. However, although he had recognized the huge potential of the DeFi protocol, Andre Cronje was still skeptical about the state of the decentralized financial market at the time:

“After my initial foray into DeFi, I realized that the space seemed to be full of marketing hype and lies, but the core decentralized technology was still strong and therefore persisted.”

According to previous reports by CoinDesk, Andre Cronje became interested in cryptocurrency at the end of the Bitcoin bull market in 2017. At that time, he had some unpleasantness with his business partner, so Andre Cronje began to study cryptocurrency white papers and GitHub repositories. Andre Cronje admitted that if his business partner continued to maintain a good relationship with him, he "might still be doing what he has been doing for the past five years, which is related to the telecommunications industry."

As his interest in cryptocurrency grew, Andre Cronje began to review codes for CryptoBriefing. As his contacts in this field became more and more extensive, he was soon invited to work on the Fantom project, a Korean blockchain platform. However, Andre Cronje did not recognize the Token culture at the time and was even a little frustrated. He said in a YouTube show Oh Hey Matty in March 2019:

“Compared with product projects, token games waste too much time, energy, and money, which is beneficial to product projects in the long run.”

Despite this, Andre Cronje decided to help "people who own crypto tokens get more crypto tokens", so he launched Yearn. In July 2020, Andre Cronje said in the FTX podcast that the Yearn project started with his attempt to manage a small stablecoin portfolio as a savings account.

In late September 2020, on Erica Kang’s YouTube show, Andre Cronje compared the 2020 DeFi craze to the initial coin offering craze of late 2017:

“We now feel that DeFi and ICOs are a bit like the same space, but it’s not really the case. Everyone thinks they need a token, so they need a yield farming farm to do liquidity mining.”

In June 2019, on Crypto Zombie’s YouTube show, Andre Cronje said he believed the DeFi industry effect was exaggerated and that he regretted “people’s obsession with chasing high-yield DeFi products.”

It was in this year that Andre Cronje saw people starting to leave the crypto industry because they were "getting more and more tired," which may have sown the seeds for him to leave the DeFi field in the future.

People have realized that the product is a lie, the adoption is a lie — all of that is garbage — and only tokens are new products to them.

Despite a little disappointment with the atmosphere in the DeFi industry, Andre Cronje launched Yearn Finance on January 20, 2020 and started running it on his own.

Yearn Financial Platform

Andre Cronje rose to fame after launching Yearn Finance in early 2020.

Yearn Finance allows digital asset holders to earn returns by investing in cryptocurrencies on the platform. Incredibly, as of May 5, 2021, the annual growth rate of assets invested by investors in Yearn Finance has increased from just 1% at the beginning to as high as 45% for some assets now.

The governance token on Yearn Finance (token holders can use this token to influence the future of the platform) is called Yearn Finance ( YFI ).

It is worth mentioning that after Yearn was launched in July 2020, all YFI tokens were allocated to liquidity providers instead of being reserved for Yearn’s founding team. Although Andre Cronje later denied this allocation method, this initial practice aroused people’s admiration for Andre Cronje, and even compared him with Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto.

However, tensions between Andre Cronje and the community began to mount after he took $15 million from the bonding curve contract of Eminence (a project Andre Cronje was working on) in late September 2020. However, by late November 2020, Yearn made a strong comeback, announcing a series of collaborations, acquisitions, and mergers with “six DeFi” projects, further promoting innovation in the DeFi space.

Andre Cronje's Net Worth

There is no reliable information about Andre Cronje's net worth on the Internet, but we can get a glimpse of it from some statistics related to his projects.

Although Andre Cronje released YFI as a "completely worthless 0 supply token", it rose 35,000% in just one week after being listed on the decentralized exchange Uniswap platform. According to CoinDesk, as of December 2020, Yearn's crypto assets were worth $650 million. As for how much YFI Andre Cronje holds, it is not yet known.

Summarize

Frankly speaking, the signs of Andre Cronje's "departure" had already appeared a few days ago.

On February 28, 2022, Andre Cronje's Twitter account @AndreCronjeTech could not be displayed, and there were rumors that he had deleted his Twitter account.

On March 4, 2022, Andre Cronje's LinkedIn profile showed that he had resigned from the Fantom Foundation and yearn.finance (last serving in February 2022), and currently only retains the position of founder of keep3r.finance.

According to crypto community member @Theologue.eth, Andre Cronje withdrew from the DeFi and Crypto fields and handed over his previous projects to other trusted developers, perhaps so that he could focus on building the Solidly ecosystem (not the Solidly project itself). Solidly is Andre Cronje's pinnacle work, the project he has invested the longest time in, and the project he is most proud of, so no one will underestimate Andre Cronje's tenacity on Solidly.

In any case, Andre Cronje will always be one of the top developers in the DeFi field and one of the few developers similar to "Satoshi Nakamoto" today.

This article comes from obpedia, original author: OBpedia