Prominent Developer Andre Cronje Leaves DeFi

Andre Cronje, one of the most prominent developers in the decentralized finance (DeFi) world, involved in both Yearn.finance and Fantom Foundation, has decided to leave the space, his long time colleague Anton Nell said on Twitter on 6 March.

In the announcement, Nell noted that both he and Cronje had decided it was time to close the chapter of contributing to the defi and crypto space, and will be “terminating” around 25 dApps they were involved in on 3 April. The list of affected projects include yearn.fi, keep3r.network, multichain.xyz, chainlist.org, bribe.crv.finance, and solidly.exchange. Nell tweeted on Sunday:

The CEO of Fantom, Michael Kong, quickly took to Twitter after the news was out, clarifying that these projects will not shut down, and that Cronje and Nell were simply “terminating” their involvement with the dApps in question. Despite this, the price of many of the tokens that were even slightly connected to Cronje saw a dip in their price after the announcement. Although they have now started to recuperate their price, YFI tumbled as much as 12%, while FTM experienced a 20% drop.

Cronje has been one of the most influential figures in the space, and while he has had a strained relationship with the DeFi, some market analysts have gone as far as call him the “Godfather of DeFi”. Signs of his plans to leave the DeFi and crypto world became clear last week, when he deleted all of his tweets from his account, and later fully deactivate the account itself.