Andre Cronje is a developer known for his work in the Fantom Foundation (FTM), the creation of Yearn Finance and Keep3rV1, as well as his involvement in DeFi projects such as Pickle, PowerPool or Sushiswap. Often critical of the users of these projects, Cronje did not hesitate to use his personal blog to point out the greed of the community, sometimes going so far as to disappear from social networks for a while.
In March 2022, Andre Cronje deleted his twitter account and let his friend and partner, Anton Nell speak for him: the two acolytes then left the crypto / DeFi ecosystem, abandoning all the projects they were working on.
Andre Cronje comes out to betray his former family
It is once again, on his personal blog Medium, that the former Godfather of DeFi decided to break the silence and express himself publicly.
If users of abandoned projects (mostly taken over by new teams) were hoping for a positive note from the developer, they might be disappointed.
The title of the post is already quite explicit: “The rise and fall of crypto culture
From the introduction, Cronje puts forward a pessimistic thought about the crypto ecosystem. According to him, we are repeating the mistakes made at the birth of monetary policy. This new system, coming to replace the old one and its flaws, would in fact be a pale copy armed with bad intentions.
He believes that people who develop new things in crypto / DeFi do so thinking to improve a system already in place in centralized finance, without having the necessary knowledge. He then compares this overconfidence with a fairly common chain of events among coders: one discovers flaws and areas for improvement in another developer’s code and quickly tells himself that he could “do it better”. He then tries to do so, but quickly runs into problems, which pushes him to finalize a code that is similar in every way to the imperfection he encountered earlier.
Andre Cronje then describes the crypto generation as those who think they know everything about monetary policy and how to “do it better” before finally realizing the complexity of the problem and the reasons for its imperfections.
The former Godfather of DeFi then speaks out about the regulation of the crypto ecosystem, quite impressively:
“Today more than ever, I see the need, even the necessity of regulation, not as a prevention mechanism, but as a protection mechanism. It’s like a child trying to stick his finger in an electrical socket, you stop him before he learns why he shouldn’t.”
Andre Cronje
This clear-cut stance on the regulation of crypto-currencies is felt as a real betrayal by many members of the DeFi community. They see Cronje as a genius developer who, after having accumulated astronomical sums of money thanks to an unregulated system, abandoned his family before attacking them.
In this metaphor, family relationships would be quite complex of course, but it is understandable that users who supported Cronje in his unregulated projects do not look kindly on the new position of their former hero.
And if the role of hero turned villain wasn’t clear enough, we can also learn on his Linkedin profile, that Andre Cronje is the founder of an investment bank called Segwit Holdings, the exact opposite of DeFi’s values.
