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Andre Cronje

DeFi Godfather Andre Cronje and Anton Nell Quit, Associated Tokens Tumble

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According to a tweet shared by Anton Nell, the DeFi godfather and the creator of Yearn.Finance and Keep3r, Andre Cronje has called it quits with fellow software architect Anton Nell.

Nell reports that effective from April 3, a total of 25 decentralized financial applications would be canceled. Yearn.Finance, Keep3r Network, Solidly, and more protocols are among the initiatives that have been abandoned.

https://twitter.com/AntonNellCrypto/status/1500405473337565191

The YFI token’s price has dropped around 13% since the announcement. However, it has subsequently recovered some of its losses. The cryptocurrency gained much attention after a big spike during “DeFi summer” in 2020, but it has since faded into oblivion.

Associated DeFi projects tumble following the news

The total value locked (TVL) of the Fantom protocol has declined by $3.35 billion since March 3, which appears to be tied to Cronje’s departure.

The Fantom (FTM) has also dropped 13% in the last 24 hours.

Solidly (SOLID) plummeted by 67% during the same period, Multichain (MULTI) fell by almost 14%, and Chainlist fell by 4.3%. All of this demonstrates Cronje’s clout in the sector. However, it also revealed how misunderstanding might derail initiatives in the DeFicontributing domain.

Andre Cronje’s initial response to the issue on the Keep3r telegram group gave the impression that the projects were closing down. But, in actuality, he was delegating to other teams.

Fear of a rug pull prompted a significant sell-off by various holders. As people hurried to withdraw their cash, Fantom Network GAS surged to 10,000 gwei.

However, the project team has attempted to explain the issues. According to the Fantom Foundation, Cronje’s departure does not affect the project since “Fantom isn’t and never was a one-man team.” Fantom employs over 40 individuals.”

It went on to say that “Andre’s choice will have no influence on Fantom’s progress.” Big things are on their way, as planned.”

Cronje’s resignation was first reported on Twitter on Saturday when he updated his LinkedIn page to reveal that the Fantom Foundation, Yearn.Finance, or Ethereum, no longer employed him.

Cronje published a blog article titled “Building in DeFi Sucks” in January, but it was nothing more than a “therapeutic” rant. Cronje is very serious about resigning, as Nell has clarified.

Binance Adds Andre Cronje’s New DeFi Token To Innovation Zone

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Binance, the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, has announced that the platform is all set to list Andre Cronje’s latest decentralized finance [DeFi] project Keep3rV1 ‘s native utility token, [KP3R] in the Innovation Zone and open trading for KP3R / BNB and KP3R / BUSD trading pairs.

Keep3r Network is an Ethereum-based project which is designed to provide a market for DevOps jobs. TWJ had previously reported that its native token skyrocketed in less than a day after its launch on the 28th of October.

However, the current price of the asset has reduced by more than 50% since the peak. The initial hype around the coin could be attributed to its association with DeFi darling, Yearn Finance, and its Creator, Andre Cronje. As the hype faded, KP3R’s value also noted a significant decline over time and was currently being traded at $155.56, according to CoinGecko.

As per the data provider, more than $36 million in volume has been traded in the past 24-hours, whereas historical data suggested the volume noted on the 28th of October was nearly $290 million. Its market cap has, on the other hand, was found to be $30.89 million, at the time of writing.

chart 1

Binance Innovation Zone

The Innovation Zone is essentially a “dedicated trading zone” that enables users to trade newer token offerings from their Binance account, simultaneously protecting less suited users from being exposed to the “risk” that comes with trading them. It was created in response to the growing calls from the community with regards to the platform’s token listing rules.

The exchange’s CEO, CZ had previously revealed that while listing popular projects is required to keep the exchange competitive, what is hard, however, is to avoid scams/bad projects. And doing both at the same time isn’t always easy, especially with the fast-moving DeFi space.

With this dedicated trading zone, Binance intended to offer its users a ‘safer space” for accessing newer and popular tokens that will likely have higher volatility than others. In this way, the exchange will be able to prevent more “untoward scenarios” for its users who just want to access certain projects.

Andre Cronje’s New DeFi Project Token KP3R Notes Surge Over 1000% In 24-Hours

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Andre Cronje, who happens to be the lead developer of the DeFi project Yearn Finance launched its third decentralized project dubbed ‘Keep3r network’ whose native token has surged by more than 1135% in less than a day. The latest price surge comes right after Cronje launched the Keep3r Network on the 28th of October. According to the data compiled by CoinGecko, the protocol’s KP3R token was being traded at  $342.

chart 7

According to the latest update by the developer, the government audit was finalized, and that the project was ready to use. Having said that, Cronje went on to caution the community to “use with care” since it was still an experimental software.

The token began trading on the world’s largest decentralized exchange [DEX] Uniswap, a week back. It was then, that KP3R surged from a little below $10 to above $200 in a very short period of time. Notably, Cronje had published his third protocol to GitHub in the third week of October rather quietly. There was no formal announcement and the launch was kept low profile which could be attributed to the controversies surrounding the Eminence Finance debacle earlier this month.

Blast from the past: A hacker was reportedly able to steal a massive $15 million user funds from Eminence’s platform while Cronje was asleep as traders rushed to invest in the protocol. Subsequently, he woke up to death threats from users who had invested in it despite his previous warnings and the fact that he had clearly mentioned that the platform was incomplete. This not only drove off Cronje from Twitter but also led to a crash in YFI’s price as well as TVL figures for Yearn.Finance from nearly $1 billion to below $400 million.

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History Repeats Itself

While this episode was a reminder and a wake-up call to many investors to not rush into an unaudited platform, there were few who repeated this with Cronje’s newest experiment as well.  A few traders and their bots quickly injected money into the Keep3r protocol and began trading the token on Uniswap. This led to a sharp price rise from just $1 to $2,000 shortly after which the token was dumped as it fell below $100.

Keep3r in Brief:

According to the official GitHub page, Keep3r  was defined as a decentralized keeper network for projects that need external DevOps and for external teams to find keeper jobs. Here, a ‘Keeper’ is the term used to refer to an external person and/or team that executes a job while a ‘Job’ is the term used to refer to a smart contract that wishes an external entity to perform an action.

Turbulent Times for COVER Protocol as Experts Call it a ‘Stealthy Rug’

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It is no longer news that decentralized finance [DeFi] is one of today’s buzzing topics among crypto enthusiasts. Wherever there is tremendous popularity and hype, predators are there. And thus, investors and traders are highly skeptical of any product offering because of the nascent nature of this space.

The latest platform that has come under tight scrutiny by community experts is the COVER protocol and its founding team more specifically. Jason Choi, the Founder of ‘The Blockcrunch Podcast’, criticized the project and revealed he was hopeful that about Cover protocol and thought that it could be a viable addition to DeFi insurance, but the team’s “repeated reckless decisions” suggested otherwise.

Jason Choi went on to claim,

“70% of new supply is rewarded to a new yield farm, to be launched. SAFE1 farm and dumpers are irrelevant. SAFE2 holders who backed the project now own 17% of the project vs 100%”

Unveiled in September this year by Chefinsurance, the Cover protocol is basically insurance to the DeFi’s smart contracts. These are inherently risky. The protocol promised to address the biggest obstruction to the DeFi space, which happens to be the involvement of humans.

Its native SAFE token witnessed two massive pumps in its price which was then followed by and two huge dumps. This happened when the token was called ‘SAFE’ and the other, after its migration to SAFE2. The SAFE token saw a meteoric surge of a whopping13,500% driving its price all the way to roughly $73,640 before crashing to the press time price of $3.66 per token.

With respect to SAFE2, soon after the token migration on the 26th of September, the token climbed all the way to $700 before dropping by nearly 90%, at an approximate press time value of $88.86.

It all started with the departure of its lead investor, Azeem Ahmad. It was primarily due to dumping and the inexperience of developers, which led to several prominent players in the industry taking over the insurance protocol.

Notably, Cover Protocol’s official blog post claimed to have received grants from Andre Cronje and Blue Kirby, both from Yearn.Finance. Additionally, Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX was also mentioned as one of the key advisors of the platform to which he commented,

It is important to note that this isn’t an isolated bizarre event. Both SBF and Andre Cronje are two very popular and vocal industry experts on Twitter and their alleged involvement in several other projects have been a bone of contention for quite some time. SBF was recently accused of allegedly borrowing YFI and destroying its price, before later selling it on Binance. Cronje, on the other hand, was in the receiving end of a severe backlash and was also sued over his unfinished Eminence Finance [EMN] project, which was hacked.

DeFi Hackers Drains $15 million From Unaudited Project Related to Yearn.Finance

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The DeFi community woke up to the news of a hacker draining $15 million from untested and unaudited codes of Andre Cronje’s latest project. Cronje, who happens to be the Founder of Yearn.Finance, was working on a new economy for a gaming multiverse, called Eminence, and wasn’t planning on releasing the project for at least another three weeks.

Following which he revealed deploying staging contracts on ETH to continue developing on it. The unaudited version was launched on the decentralized platform, Uniswap. Cronje tweeted the project’s logo last night.

However, he woke up in the middle of the night to find that almost $15 million was deposited into the contracts as speculators driven by FOMO rushed in to purchase the platform’s native EMN tokens.

A hacker discovered a rogue function that allowing the minting of unlimited EMN tokens, burn an equal amount of EMN tokens against another crypto-asset, and sell that to those rushing in to buy the token. The hacker went ahead and exploited the flaw in the contracts leading to a loss of $15 million. In a rather bizarre event, Cronje revealed that the hacker returned over $8 million of the stolen funds to his own deployer contracts.

The returned funds will be directed to all those who rushed into buying the EMN token. Despite this, he continued to receive threats. Revealing the same, Cronje tweeted,

“As I am receiving a fair amount of threats, I have asked yearn treasury to assist with refunding the 8m the hacker sent. The multisig is safer and as such I feel more comfortable with them having the funds. Funds will be returned to holders pre-hack snapshot.”

Following this episode, the developer urged the community to wait for official announcements and further added,

“Given some of the responses, let me be clear, do not use random contracts I deploy unless I reference it in a medium article. The contracts I deployed yesterday were purely for myself to engage with, both GIL and EMN are staging and will not be used.”

Yearn.Finance’s YFI Rushes Towards ATH After Founder Hints at Major Update

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Yearn.Finance has taken the world of DeFi by storm. Officially introduced in July 2020, the DeFi protocol has $813.25 million in total value locked. Over the past four-days, its native token, YFI underwent a significant of nearly 70% despite a price stagnation in the overall cryptocurrency market. At the time of writing, YFI was priced at $29,016.

YFI e1601194256643

The decentralized finance space had a rather slow week. As depicted by the above chart, YFI had hit an all-time high on the 12th of September. However, it was one of the worst-hit DeFi tokens, along with Uniswap’s UNI token, during the recent sell-off that hit Ethereum and the rest of the altcoin that ultimately drove YFI’s price to decline by nearly 50%.

But the latest uptrend could be directed towards its previous high could be directed to a major update that involves the incorporation of other popular DeFi protocols such as Synthetix, Aave, Chainlink, and running on layer 1 and 2 solutions of the Ethereum network. This was hinted by Yearn.Finance’s Developer and Founder Andre Cronje who tweeted,

https://twitter.com/AndreCronjeTech/status/1308812154527780865

Yearn.Finance happens to be the first-ever project on the Ethereum network whose governance is entirely in the hands of token holders. The latest development is likely to provide users with solutions that allow them to reduce transaction fees. This coupled with an active community as well as governance forums has fostered further gains for the native token YFI.

Cronje had earlier held an online poll in which he proposed a measure to the community seeking to cap the total supply of YFI tokens at its current 30,000. This essentially meant that if the minting function is removed, no member in the Yearn.Finance ecosystem or any of its multi-sig holders will be able to print more tokens in the future which in turn could further curb the rise of potential inflation due to increased token supply at the same time preventing a possible manipulation in the protocol’s governance system.

More recently, Lou Kerner, Partner at CryptoOracle had recently published a blog post in which he lauded the project and revealed,

“Yearn is so impressive because it takes the massive opportunity and remarkable complexity of DeFi, makes it simple to use, while deeply integrating with leading DeFi protocols [e.g. Uniswap & Curve], and leveraging community as a powerful moat.”