Partnered With:

The DeFi world in the eyes of Andre Cronje

Read this article in 28 Minutes

DeFi made me ignore my life, my health, and my mind. I have to put it first.

Original title: "Andre Cronje: DeFi Expressionist"

Original author: Brady Dale

Original translation: 0x13, Rhythm BlockBeats

< /p>

Andre Cronje has no love for cryptocurrencies.

This summer, when every start-up project on the Ethereum network began to use "governance" tokens to promote their projects When developing, Andre Cronje, founder of Yearn Finance, launched a token with great potential that was not reserved by the team.

Any issuance method that circumvents the reserved tokens in this way is now known as a "fair issuance".

“Andre Cronje invented a new way to launch projects that don’t require funding,” said Scott Lewis of DeFi Pulse Said, "He proved that you can gather a community through a project, and then let the development team officially launch this DeFi project through community funding."

< p line="dT0d">This "perverse" behavior is less surprising when one sees Andre Cronje as a "creator" rather than a "developer", an "artist" rather than an "arbitrageur" .

In Erica Kang’s YouTube show at the end of September, Andre Cronje compared DeFi in 2020 with the IC0 boom at the end of 2017 compared. “We are now facing the same problem. Everything confirms that they really need a token, and they really think they need liquidity mining.” He said.

He went on to say: "Too many people blindly follow the trend, making it difficult for outsiders to take this DeFi movement seriously, because , when you come to the DeFi field as a potential and interested investor to look for some investment opportunities, you will first read reports of serious losses caused by loopholes in many projects.”

Andre Cronje has mixed feelings about the potential for growth in this area. As he said on another YouTube show, CryptoZombie, in March 2019, he both thinks it's overhyped and regrets that people are blindly chasing yield. He told the story of when he went to the Consensus 2018 conference, when, while people joked about the transformative potential of blockchain, they were still "hopeful." But in 2019, people either left the encryption field, or became confused. “People have realized that product is a lie, adoption is a lie, all these products are crap, and now tokens are the new product,” he said.

Andre Cronje interviewed at Seoul Blockchain Week 2019

Despite his numerous reservations about the space, on January 20, 2020, Andre Cronje pushed for what will become the Yearn Finance of the future. first application. As a revenue-optimizing application, Yearn Finance manages $1 billion in assets under Ethereum-based smart contracts.

It is worth mentioning that this is done by Andre Cronje alone, not a team or a company. He is very clear that this is his own operation, this is not an accident. He's said in various podcasts and videos over the past year that he can leave at any time, and he's largely kept that option open because he never commits to something he can't responsibly walk away from. matter.

“I have no vision, I have no plan. I have no plan. I have no goal.” He told Kang, “Now It’s fun, but maybe it gets boring after a month, when I’ll probably go home and play World of Warcraft.”

When someone repeatedly tells people that they can leave at any time, it may mean that the person will actually leave.

Artists, not engineers

Speaking of which, let me say something up front: Andre Cronje is unwilling to accept my interview because I wrote an article in October saying he was leaving DeFi, and he didn't want me to write that article.

I am writing this because he told me that and I know there is a lot at stake. Yearn was managing more than $700 million in assets at the time, and much of that was underpinned by Andre Cronje's cult personality.

Stani Kulechov, CEO of cryptocurrency marketplace Aave, works extremely closely with Andre Cronje, although they have not met in person. "I know Andre Cronje, he doesn't care too much about financial issues. Even if he does, he doesn't care too much. He cares more about the product, creating something that people think is cool. His heart is actually A creator,” Kulechov said.

“DeFi makes me ignore my life, my health, my mind. I have to put it First.”

After that story came out, Andre Cronje messaged me on Telegram, writing, He won't reply to my messages anymore. Nonetheless, I reached out for an interview for this story and have not heard back. He really walks the talk.

Anyway, after I reported on Andre Cronje's possible departure from DeFi, he's back to working like crazy middle. Maybe he thought about starting work again after telling me he might leave. In retrospect, this may indeed be the case, but I don't know much about his past, and I still can't understand that he is an "artist" rather than an "engineer".

Explore the encryption world

Andre Cronje's interest in crypto dates back to the end of the last Bitcoin bull run, when he started reading white papers and Github repos sometime around the end of 2017 when his business partner left him for his honeymoon.

“If he hadn’t gotten married and gone on his honeymoon, I’d probably still be doing what we’ve been doing for the past five years things,” says Andre Cronje.

In September 2020, on Laura Shin's podcast "Unchained," he said that late 2017 "was the first There are enough assets, there are enough agreements, there are enough tools."

According to his LinkedIn According to the data, Andre Cronje is older than most people who are deeply involved in the encryption field. Before learning to code, he studied law. Once he became interested in code, he taught himself incredibly quickly and soon found himself working in telecommunications, where he became acquainted with distributed systems.

When the crypto space caught his attention, he started doing code reviews at Crypto Briefing. Eventually, he started working on the project Fantom, a DAG blockchain from South Korea.

Even so, he has grown frustrated with token culture. He said on the YouTube show "Oh Hey Matty" in March 2019: "Compared to playing the product game, playing the token game wastes too much time, energy and capital, and in the long run, the product game is harmful to the token It’s good.”

Nevertheless, he accepted the challenge to help those who own crypto tokens gain More tokens.

“The Yearn thing is actually because I have a small stablecoin Manage it like a savings account,” Andre Cronje said on the July 29 FTX podcast. "90% of DeFi workers are working on how these protocols interact."

He prefers stablecoins because He dislikes dealing with impermanent losses, i.e. liquidity pools for other volatile tokens that also lose dollar value when the value of the crypto increases. "I don't like to make decisions about cryptocurrencies because I don't understand the cryptocurrency market." Andre Cronje said.

On February 4, he wrote an article on Medium about the launch of iEarn (later to become Y. Earn, or Yearn, and how he spent thousands of dollars out of his own pocket just to get it online. At the end of the month, he wrote another article saying that launching it was more difficult than he expected.

“It was fun to face all these challenges and I believe each challenge created a stronger ecosystem system," wrote Andre Cronje, "and expect more problems to arise."

It soon became a prophecy, "more problems" came. “There was a front-end issue where someone changed a large amount of money and caused some losses,” Kulechov said.

Andre Cronje wrote a blog post titled "Building DeFi sucks". Part of it is: "Honestly, it sucks. It burns money and the community is hostile."

He went on to complain about the constant criticism he faced and the unrealistic expectations of users. It should be said that, to some extent, Andre Cronje did raise user expectations in a strange way. In his articles about the progress of iEarn, he always writes it as "we" did this or "we" launched that, even though it's really just him.

Kulechov said he felt Andre Cronje realized, "I don't want to be like a 24/7 7 like a bank". It was too much for him to process, Kulechov guessed, "and then he just disappeared."

AC’s whimsy

p>
After that exit from DeFi, he was mainly busy playing the online game World of Warcraft, he told Kang.

But he also told Kang that he is "Batman" and that he will be there when people need him There, help people seize opportunities to the greatest extent possible.

According to Kulechov, liquidity mining became an issue in June after Compound released the COMP governance token. The catalyst for people entering the DeFi world seems to be what drew Andre Cronje back.

It was also in that era that Kulechov was really confused by Andre Cronje's penchant for deploying test apps directly to mainnet. As he keeps saying in his Twitter profile, "I test in prod". By "prod" he refers to "production," and "production" refers to projects deployed on the Ethereum mainnet.

Kulechov said he would let Andre Cronje do the test after the test, but at the time he didn't like it, it wasn't him style of. “For him, showing his work on the mainnet is actually creating this artwork and putting it on display in a public place,” Kulechov said. The test network is short-lived and can be ignored.

This new iteration renames iEarn to Y.Earn (from "I Earn" to " You earn (You Earn)"), a month after the release of COMP, Andre Cronje wrote an article "Liquidity Mining 101" on Medium, and he explained quite proudly that when stablecoin deposits can also earn unstable How complex is yield optimization when it comes to tokens that are price-increasing.

On July 17th, Andre Cronje revealed his token plan: YFI token. At this time, Andre Cronje's image is extremely tall and majestic, because he will not set aside any funds for himself. All money will be distributed to liquidity providers.

It brings the concept of fair distribution mentioned above to DeFi. On Yearn, anyone can get YFI tokens equally as long as they put their liquidity in several pools, there is no pre-deposit, no reservation, and no pre-mining. Bitcoin can actually be said to do this, except that it rewards hash power instead of deposits, but it's still putting resources where a project most wants people to contribute.

"Dozens of projects have been inspired by Yearn's fair distribution and launched in the same way. The success of YFI has greatly It makes it easier for developers to bring their creations to market,” Lewis said.

Kulechov, a project founder himself, said that team assignments are not just for Extracting wealth from the world is also about staying relevant. “A lot of founders are always thinking. What if governance doesn’t want to support me? What if they want to get rid of me? They have these concerns,” he said.

Andre Cronje thinks just the opposite.

But he didn't even stop there. In mid-August, he appeared on a Zapper live broadcast with several other celebrities in the DeFi field, and he said: "The state I want to achieve is that I can completely remove myself from the ecosystem, and it is still in normal operation. way.”

YFI is his way of doing it. (A side note about the name: According to the community, the official pronunciation is "wifey" (which helps explain web memes), but Andre Cronje told Erica Kang on YouTube that he conceived the pronunciation as "wi-fi ".)

He doesn't even intend to impose a pronunciation, even this is up to the community to decide.

“Whether to withdraw from the community must be based on your own wishes,” Andre Cronje told Shin, “If the founding As for the human part, everyone hopes that the founder or the team will always be responsible for the project.”

As for whether Andre Cronje will one day Will actually exit Yearn, remains to be seen.

When Andre Cronje was still chatting with me, he specifically mentioned the fact that he was still writing All the key codes of Yearn, he also said so in some shows (such as in Shin's podcast).

Maybe he wants people to believe that he doesn't want to control Yearn, when in fact he really doesn't want to control Yearn. Maybe deep down he didn't want to control Yearn and move on, but was too shy to say it outright.

Refused to be a leader

p>
CoinDesk first reported on the YFI distribution on July 20. This is the first time I know about Andre Cronje, who I was still skeptical when I wrote the story. That weekend, I got a message that there was a fear that too much money was pouring in, and Andre Cronje had full control over it.

The incident happened just as "workaholic" Andre Cronje was taking a break. When he woke up, he acted quickly and changed the key of the agreement to multiple signatures to dispel everyone's concerns, but he did not show sympathy for those who lost in this turmoil, because it is too common .

On the FTX show, Tristan Yver will ask him what advice he has for others who want to build DeFi products . He replied, "You have to push yourself hard, like you have a deep hatred against yourself."

He Explaining that DeFi is growing at such a rapid pace, it requires full commitment. He said: "DeFi made me ignore my life, my health, my mind. I really have to put it first, if you don't want to do it, it will make you collapse."

He also seemed to have almost collapsed. In early August, Decrypt reported that he almost quit. He denied that report on Shin's show, though it's important to note that he said roughly the same thing on Zapper's live stream:

< p line="7mdP">"The past few weeks I've wanted to quit angrily more than I can describe. At this point people's expectations have reached the point where I feel unreasonable. I often get angry. ”

This is the second time he wants to quit.

Despite decentralization within the crypto industry, crypto is made of humans and humans always do the same Thing: They're looking for a leader. If they don't find one, they build one. Then they wrap their identities around these leaders, and then they do what people do with leaders: follow suit.

Can Bitcoin solve this problem? not yet. Ethereum clearly does not solve this problem. Chainlnk chose to embrace it.

Andre Cronje has become more than just a DeFi developer, but a leader, even though he doesn't want to. Now DeFi insiders follow him blindly, and Andre Cronje, as an "artist", all he wants is for people to take a look.

Open source is a double-edged sword

Andre Cronje is brilliant about the ambivalence of the industry and its culture, yet obsessed with user base approval.

In September, during a livestream with Chainlink's Sergey Nazarov, Andre Cronje said: "People are making money like crazy, They're making money like crazy because we've created a whole new Ponzi scheme that's governance tokens and we give away free worthless tokens and for some reason people buy them and then The next wave of people came in and bought these tokens."

"Over the past few weeks, I think Anger gave up more than words can describe."

Andre Cronje himself, of course, created the most valuable Coins, he is very clear about this, but also quite confused. Whenever people asked him to explain why it was worth so much, he would falter.

But because of the existence of YFI, people's following him has evolved into a lemming effect. September’s Yearn performed quite well in all aspects, with a total value locked in the range of 659 million to 959 million US dollars.

Andre Cronje has started work on a game app called Eminence, and it looks like it will be a game app using NFT card game. Andre Cronje teased the game on Twitter, and fans started searching for token contract addresses on Ethereum. When they found it, users dropped $15 million without even knowing what it was.

$15 million goes missing after a flash loan attack.

As it happens, on the day Andre Cronje previewed his new NFT-based game product, I posted an article about There have been reports about the marriage of NFT and DeFi, so Andre Cronje is doing more things with these tokens, as a way to further promote this marriage, I am very interested.

On Telegram, I sent him a Rekt blog post about vulnerabilities and wanted to ask him what Do something with NFT. This is his reply to me: "I will not continue to build." Andre Cronje has been silent since then, but almost when he is about to return, history will repeat itself. He also released some smart contracts on the mainnet about "discussion items" called liquidity benefits.

So in an article titled "Unscrambling My Relationship with DeFi", Andre Cronje wrote:< /p>

"Open source is a double-edged sword. I need to think more about it."

Can blockchain change the world

In spite of this, he has no intention of leaving anymore, his new projects, such as Keep3r Network, Deriswap, are in progress, and he announced that Yearn will merge with both Sushi and Pickle.

He may focus on improving yields, but not for his own gain. Like a gamer who wants to unlock new levels. Think of an artist who just wants to leave behind his creations. If you understand it this way, the "leave" that Andre Cronje said is better understood. If he can't experience the fun, there is no need to continue for money (after all, Azeroth has been waiting for his return).

Technical experts often refer to the stack, how software continues to develop on top of software. The underlying protocol of this stack is not TCP/IP, but people. Our software is much more immutable than smart contracts on Ethereum. So far, you can't even fork it.

We get stuck in our own circle, and so does Andre Cronje. As long as he decides to keep developing, to keep building apps the way he wants, he'll be stuck in his own circle.

AI software is the reason encryption has gotten to where it is, but life hasn’t really changed. As Andre Cronje told Kang, "People always say blockchain is going to revolutionize the world — no, it won't."