Andre Cronje and Anton Nell Decided to Leave DeFi

DeFi architects Andre Cronje and Anton Nell, who have years of experience in developing and leading various projects, made a decision to leave the industry.

According to a tweet by Anton Nell, the pair is ending the chapter of contributing to the DeFi/crypto sector. Nell added that there are about 25 apps and services that he, along with Cronje, are terminating on April 3.

Andre and I have decided that we are closing the chapter of contibuting to the defi/crypto space.
There are around ~25 apps and services that we are terminating on 03 April 2022.
1/3

— Anton Nell (@AntonNellCrypto) March 6, 2022

This doesn't mean that the products stop operating. They are based on smart contracts and can't be shut down. Their front end, domains, and web apps will be changed.

The list includes yield farming platform Yiern Finance, development-focused platform Keep3r Network, cross-chain router protocol Multichain, Solidly Exchange, EVM networks list Chainlist, and others. Cryptocurrencies platform associated with Cronje fell significantly after the news went public.

Fantom FTM and Yearn Finance YFI fell by 18% and 9% respectively and they are currently trading at $1.35 and $18.300. Yearn Finance developer banteg wrote that Cronje hasn’t worked on the project for over a year. He mentioned that even in that case, there are around 190 people contributing to the project to back things up.

Although Cronje and Nell didn’t announce the reasons for their leaving, the move wasn’t totally unexpected. Previously, Cronje spoke about the challenges in DeFi, and published an article why “building in DeFi sucks”. However, Nell wrote that unlike the previous approach, the decision isn’t a reaction to a certain case, but it has been considered for a while now.