The popular DeFi architect, the technical advisor to Fantom Foundation and founder of Yearn Finance, Andre Cronje, has reportedly left the decentralized finance (DeFi) space reeling after having deactivated his Twitter account.
Cronje’s long-known colleague at the Fantom Foundation, Anton Nell has, tweeted on March 6 officially announcing his and Cronje’s departure from the crypto space entirely. However, major concerns have arisen in the market about the future of a total of 25 decentralized apps (dApps) and services that the duo had been operating up to now. Fantom Opera is a layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution.
According to the latest updates, the apps and services which would be most affected by this step are yearn.fi, keep3r.network, multichain.xyz, chainlist.org, bribe.crv.finance, and the new solidly.exchange.
The crypto community’s response to Nell’s announcement has mostly been sympathetic, with netizens lauding the duo for taking a break from their rigorous projects.
CEO of Fantom, Michael Kong, has clarified that the consequences of Cronje’s and Nell’s stepping, stating that the projects Cronje are associated with as the founder, would not get closed down as several of those “have been running independently for years.”
Yearn Finance lead developer, Banteg, has also assured users and investors that Cronje’s leaving would have little consequence in the daily operation of the DeFi yield aggregator.
The price of Yearn (YFI) and Fantom (FTM) were noted to have crashed immediately after Nell’s tweet. According to CoinGecko, YFI is currently about 10% down to $18,187, while FTM is down by 20% at $1.33.
Although the total value locked (TVL) at Yearn has been almost steady at $3 billion, Fantom TVL has been down by 40% since March 3 to $7.16 billion. In Cronje’s latest project, Solidly, the TVL has marked a drop of 68% since March 3 to $735 million as per data from DeFiLlama.
Cronje has been one of the most influential personas in the DeFi space since its rise to prominence with profound contributions, urging market analyst The DeFi Edge to lament his leaving and tweet, “Andre Cronje is the Godfather of DeFi” in a March 6 post.
Cronje’s resignation from the crypto space, however, is not sudden. It had been evident for long and became abundantly clear last week when all of his tweets had been deleted from his account, leading to a full deactivation.
Core members of Wonderland (TIME) and Abracadabra.money (MIM) Dani Sesta have signed on to do the marketing for Cronje’s latest project, Solidly.
