Prominent DeFi Developer Andre Cronje Leaves Crypto, Several Tokens See Sell-Offs

Key highlights:

• Andre Cronje, who founded Yearn Finance and was a prolific contributor to DeFI, will no longer be working on DeFi and crypto projects
• The news was announced by Anton Nell, who was a frequent collaborator with Cronje
• Several tokens from projects Cronje has worked on saw sharp price drops after the news came out

Prominent developer Andre Cronje leaves DeFi and crypto

Prominent DeFi (decentralized finance) developer Andre Cronje will no longer be contributing to crypto projects, according to Anton Nell, a developer who frequently collaborated with Cronje. Nell also says that he himself will no longer be contributing to DeFi and crypto. 

In his Twitter post, Nell said that he and Cronje will be terminating around 25 apps and services on April 3. For some of the most notable projects, Nell linked to alternative interfaces maintained by others that will still allow users to interact with the underlying technology. For example, Yearn Finance users will be able to access the protocol through the yearn.finance interface after the yearn.fi interface is discontinued. Similar alternatives are available for Keep3r and Multichain.

When accessing sites like yearn.fi, users are greeted with a notification stating that the service will not be available from April 3 onwards. It also contains the following message:

“The source code is open source, anyone that would like to continue hosting this service is welcome to.”

Nell said that his and Cronje’s move to stop working in crypto and DeFi is not a “knee jerk reaction”, explaining that it’s “a decision that has been coming for a while now”.

Cronje either founded or was involved with several DeFi projects, although he was not actively involved with all of them. For example, when some users started expressing concerns about Yearn Finance after the news of Cronje’s departure from crypto, Yearn Finance developer Banteg clarified that Cronje hasn’t worked on the project for over a year.

People burying $YFI, you do realize Andre hasn’t worked on it for over a year? And even if he did, there are 50 full-time people and 140 part-time contributors to back things up.

— banteg (@bantg) March 6, 2022

Tokens from projects connected to Cronje took a hit in the markets

Still, Andre Cronje’s exit from crypto has had an impact on a number of tokens released by projects he was associated with. The SOLID token by hybrid automated market maker Solidly is down 77% in the last 7 days. 

After the news broke, Yearn Finance’s $YFI quickly plunged from just under $20,000 to $18,000, but found support at that level. Currently, the token is changing hands at about $19,200. 

The news also contributed to a sell-off in the markets for FTM, the native asset of the Fantom blockchain. FTM fell from $1.65 to $1.35, but has since recovered slightly to about $1.43. According to DeFi Llama, the TVL (total value locked) in the Fantom DeFi ecosystem dropped from $9.05 billion to $7.29 billion in the last 24 hours, a decrease of almost 20%.

In a Twitter post, the Fantom Foundation thanked Cronje for his contributions, but clarified that he was not one of their core developers and that his departure will not have an impact on the future development of Fantom. 

We're extremely grateful to Andre for all he did for crypto as a whole.

However, Fantom isn't and never was a one man team.

There are 40+ people working at Fantom.

— Fantom Foundation (@FantomFDN) March 6, 2022