Andre Cronje, the founder of Yearn Finance and technical advisor of Fantom Foundation, has quit for good. This comes just days after his new project was criticized for a security flaw that caused funds to disappear from liquidity pools.
Anton Nell, Cronje’s long-time partner who is a Fantom software architect, has also called it quits. He said 25 DeFi applications, including Yearn Finance and Keep3r Network, and Bribe Finance, will be terminated starting April 3. Solidly, a new project that hit $2.24 million after going live on February 24 will also be halted. Nell revealed that they had been contemplating to make this decision for quite some time. He highlighted a blog post Building in DeFi Sucks published in January by Cronje.
Word of Cronje’s departure from the DeFi space was being speculated over the past week when he deleted his Twitter account without an explanation. The CEO of Fantom Michael Kong revealed that the developer was stepping back from public life for the time being. He said Cronje was “getting too much hate”.
Analysts believe Cronje’s abrupt department from the DeFi space could put billions of dollars of investors’ funds at risk. Larry Cermak, the vice president of research at The Block, described Cronje and Nell’s departure as “pretty insane”. He highlighted that unless this is some regulatory psyops and anons are coming back, this is pretty insane. Cermak pointed out that Solidly just launched a few weeks ago.
Meanwhile, as the DeFi ecosystem grappled with this news, prices of tokens linked to Cronje fell sharply. YFI – Yearn Finance token declined by 13% to $17,719. The native token of Cronje’s new protocol, SOLID fell 66% to $1.14. Fanton was also hit, it tanked 16% to $1.40. According to data by DeFi Llama, Fantom’s total value locked has dropped 15% to $6.93 billion over the past 24-hours. Since March 3, the total sum of assets managed under the Fantom protocol has sunk by more than $4.4 billion.
