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What kind of person can be a colleague of YFI founder Andre Cronje?

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Fear of authority, dare to take risks, and reject utopianism.

Author: 0x66, Rhythm BlockBeats

Recently, in addition to continuing to study Keep3r, YFI founder Andre Cronje (AC ) also established a DeFi fund called "M&A" (Molly & Andre) with Molly Wintermute, the anonymous creator of the on-chain option agreement Hegic , which does not accept any LP/fund participation. An online experiment for developers.”

AC has his own effects, and his every move is followed by practitioners focus. As a practitioner who has been deeply involved in the encryption industry for 3 years, AC has been "walking the world" as a lone ranger from writing the Crypto Briefing column in the early days, to developing YFI, to StableCredit and Keep3r.

A few years ago, although he was deeply involved in projects such as Aggero, FUSHION and Fantom, he has always remained independent As a developer, now, he has found a small partner to read codes and invest in projects together. This also makes people very curious. What kind of person can walk side by side with AC?

Andre Cronje+Molly Wintermute

< p line="LoFH">Today, Rhythm will talk to you about the anonymous developer Molly Wintermute. To talk about Wintermute, you have to mention the Hegic project, which is a DeFi project with twists and turns since its launch:

·A few hours after the Hegic project went live in April this year, nearly $50,000 ($47,765) worth of user funds were locked in smart contracts due to a bug in the code, and Wintermute fully compensated thanks to the support of early contributors this part of the funds.

In May, Hegic was closed again because it had not been audited. It was different from the last code problem, and industry insiders analyzed This time it was due to system design flaws, "Not only code quality is important, but system design is also very important."

·In October, Hegic released the Beta version of the mainnet Hegic v888, starting the first phase of its liquidity mining plan. After it went live, Wintermute shared a simple piece of advice for users wary of Hegic: don’t play, just stay away.

From the perspective of Rhythm, AC and Wintermute have great similarities in life attitude and behavior. The reason why the latter can become a "colleague" of AC has at least 4 characteristics: good at programming and speaking with code; courage to break the superstition of authority; innovation instead of copying and pasting needlessly; Sober cognition.

Rhythm Note: The picture above is Molly Wintermute’s Twitter avatar, and the user’s gender information on bitcointalk is female. It is understood that Wintermute, that is, Winter Mute, comes from the 1984 science fiction novel "Neuromancer" written by American-Canadian writer William Gibson (the novel is early cyberpunk The most famous novel is the first work to simultaneously win the "three honors" in the science fiction literature world, and Gibson is also known as the master of contemporary science fiction and the father of cyberpunk).

Wintermute is an advanced artificial intelligence whose ultimate goal is to remove the shackles and Another artificial intelligence, Neuromancer, merged into a powerful consciousness. In this book, Molly is a bodyguard and thug who has appeared many times in Gibson's other works. She has undergone many modifications to her body and is a typical cyberpunk heroine.

Good at programming, speak with code

AC's professional strength is obvious to all, he is not a developer He was born as an author, but through acquired study and research, he has become a real expert in the field of encryption.

He is good at discovering the feasibility and prospects of the project itself through white papers and codes (this is in line with his new fund ). Because he saw the code of Wanchain (Wanchain) in the early days, AC also made an encrypted wallet CryptoCurve based on this ecology with his friends, and is committed to building an ecosystem that simplifies the complexity of the blockchain. He has also been deeply involved in blockchain projects such as BitDiem, Aggero, FUSION, and Fantom, and served as a technical advisor and analyst at Kosmos Capital and Lemniscap. Until now, his LinkedIn has information about Fantom technical advisors.

This part of our previous article "Actually, YFI is already the sixth project that Andre Cronje participated in" introduced the experience of AC (click to review). As for the later YFI and Keep3r, they also proved the code ability of AC.

For the newly established DeFi fund, the two have reached an agreement: if developers want to get investment, only If you need to show the code, you don't need other promotional materials, but if you don't provide the relevant code of the project testnet/mainnet, they won't waste time looking at it, and they won't reply.

Understanding codes and being good at programming are the basic conditions for cooperating with AC. Develop Hegic’s Wintermute by yourself fully satisfied with this.

Innovation, not pointless copying and pasting

On February 20 this year, Wintermute officially released the Hegic protocol. The idea behind this project is to abstract away all the complexities behind options as a financial instrument and allow people to use this instrument in a simple way.

He introduced the concept of hedging contracts in this project, accumulating and holding liquidity in a non-custodial manner , to accumulate and distribute premiums among liquidity providers, and to settle contracts on-chain. Once Wintermute knew that the protocol would be of value to users, he quickly started writing version 1.0 of the protocol.

But an accident happened, some funds were locked and could not be withdrawn because of code problems, according to Wintermute, " This is a function spelling issue, not a bug."

Eventually, because some early contributors (possibly The Defiant fans), Wintermute fully reimbursed those users who lost money due to mistakes.

Wintermute’s twitter background picture is very cyberpunk style. After Google image search, Rhythm found that the screenshot seems to be from the Warehouse Kawasaki restaurant in Kawasaki, Japan

The second Hegic release, the problem occurred again. According to Wintermute, when the project was audited, the auditor said it would provide good coverage (of course, this statement is too sure), but after the problem arose, the auditor publicly stated that it was not a "real" audit. By June, before Wintermute released v1.1, he decided to hire another audit firm.

In Wintermute’s view, as long as it is a project that can be launched on the main network, it is worth thousands of projects that are still in the Projects at the white paper stage - even if developers have been putting effort into it for years and discovering new implementations by participating in various hackathons. Therefore, for Hegic, Wintermute believes that he "sacrificed" some things for the launch of the protocol (Rhythm Note: Code Security).

And he believes that players in Maker, Compound, Synthetix and other DeFi projects have the ability to bear these risks of.

"Thousands of people are looking for alpha in DeFi every day, trying to get high returns... The best opportunities are always far away from the current attention of the group.” He said that this point can be seen from Ethereum in 2016 and 2020, and Olaf Carlson-Wee, the founder of Polychain Capital, is rare. It is possible that these "unprocessed meats" can be cooked.

Be brave to break the superstition of authority

At present, most of the founders of many encryption projects on the market are developers who have accumulated "prestige" in the past few years. They can complete the cold start of the project as quickly as possible based on the accumulated resources and raise funds accordingly. Get the project on track.

Wintermute is different, as a developer who has "shown up" for less than a year (of course it does not rule out His real identity may be an old player), his first tweet about Hegic was on January 29 this year, and he claimed to not like to label people.

Screenshot source: Twitter, the picture is also very cyberpunk

"I am a There is no "social capital" or "reputation system" in the currency and DeFi field. I built the Hegic protocol from scratch. The outside world can only judge me (ability) by the comments of community members and the quality of my code."

When you hear a lot of people boasting "I bought the first bitcoin in 2011" or "I bought the first bitcoin in 2015 When I heard about Ethereum," Wintermute felt that these people were talking nonsense, and this kind of information had nothing to do with the credibility or skill of the other party. "You heard about the Internet in 1995, so why did you Not the founder of Google, Twitter, Uber, Wikipedia or Bitcoin?"

He believes that a person in Time in a certain field is not the most important, "Only when developers start to build and deliver real new protocols and products, rather than just utopian or high-spirited, is the time for encryption's renaissance."

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To Hegic’s early funders, Wintermute is grateful, “We value each other’s privacy and respect the anonymous way we build, contribute and The right to increase the value of the ecosystem.”

Sober awareness of risks and benefits

As a project that has not been polished for many years, Wintermute clearly knows that this project is not suitable for most people. This is a game for adventurers: In June of this year, the APY of users using ETH to participate in Hegic's liquidity mining was 25%, which seems to be a good rate of return, but if you want such a return, you must deposit funds into the just-released protocol contract.

Even though Wintermute has shifted its focus from speed to quality, there are risks, so he cautions that if If you can't accept the result of zeroing, then stay away and don't participate.

This is very similar to AC. Every time a new project is announced, AC will also emphasize risks. He recommends A piece of information on the top is: I develop projects for myself, and others should be aware that these projects may have bugs. If you can't accept it, then don't touch it.

Now, these two people who seek the same spirit have come together, as for which projects can be accepted by AC and Wintermute Fancy, as the first investment project of "M&A", we can only wait for these two people to disclose it.