Andre Cronje is a name that cannot be ignored in the crypto world. In just two years, from YFI to Solidly, he has created or participated in more than 20 DeFi projects, with an average of one project born every month, bringing huge wealth effects to the crypto market. He is considered to be the person who knows DeFi best. Many comprehensive investment websites have a special AC section, which shows his status in the crypto field. Old investors also understand that they should keep an eye on AC’s Twitter. As long as AC makes an order, they will buy it immediately with a high probability of making money.
This time, as he announced his withdrawal from the crypto world, the projects he previously led experienced an epic plunge. The prices of several recent mining coins have been halved again and again. People who went mining with the dream of high returns have fled in panic. The FTM chain was once extremely stuck, and gas fees repeatedly hit new highs.
How did this legendary man transform from an indebted engineer into a crypto idol? Was his withdrawal this time due to exhaustion from facing doubts for two years, or was it because his financial freedom had lost his fighting spirit? He was like a shining meteor, crossing the night sky of the crypto world. No matter how the history of crypto will record Andre Cronje, there will be a wonderful chapter for him.
I have always wanted to write about the influential figures in the crypto world. Andre Cronje just announced his withdrawal. He is a very legendary figure, so I decided to write about Andre Cronje.
Computer genius, top student of law
Like Musk, Andre Cronje was also born in South Africa. South Africa is really a magical country that has provided a lot of talents to the United States. Andre Cronje studied law at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. His ideal was to become an excellent lawyer like most young people. But once there was a computer experiment and his friend wanted him to help, he readily agreed. It was during this help that he discovered that computers were a magical world. Then he taught himself computers, and relied on his talent to complete the computer course by himself. He also stayed in school and became a lecturer in computer science.
After that, Andre Cronje started to participate in a large number of technical projects. He served as the technical team leader of Vodacom, an African mobile communications company, a mobile project developer of Mapplications, and a software architect of Full Facing. Each job lasted only a short time, about a year, which also reflects that Andre Cronje's withdrawal this time may not have any special meaning, but it is just his personality.
Entering the Crypto World
Andre Cronje really came into contact with the crypto world in 2017. He and his friends developed the crypto wallet CryptoCurve, but it eventually came to nothing. At the beginning of 2018, AC opened a personal column on the crypto media Crypto Briefing and began to review many projects in depth, such as Cosmos, Grin, Holochain, IRIS Network, QuarkChain, etc. Because of his professionalism, he attracted many fans.
At this time, Andre Cronje was still trapped by life. He slowly began to invest in some Bitcoin and Ethereum. By 2019, Bitcoin and Ethereum were more volatile. Andre Cronje didn't want to be affected by the volatility, so he simply exchanged all the Bitcoin and Ethereum he had into stablecoins. Although the returns were not high, it was still better than keeping them in traditional banks.
Like every investor, Andre Cronje also pays attention to the rate of return. He has to study a large number of lending agreements and then manually select the ones with the highest APY. However, there are new agreements every day and the APY of each agreement will change. Andre Cronje soon found that this method is too time-consuming and very unscientific. Smart people will always discover business codes from clumsy ways.
The "cheating" encryption journey begins
Following this line of thought, on January 6, 2020, Andre Cronje spent US$42,467 to create Yearn.Finance. Auditing and custody before going online also cost money, but at that time Andre Cronje had no extra savings, so he had to mortgage his house to continue the development of the project.
Andre Cronje's forward-thinking did not attract much attention at the time. It must have been very difficult for Andre Cronje, who mortgaged his house. He was middle-aged and started a business, but there was still no improvement in half a year. However, the crypto era did not abandon him. On June 16 of that year, the lending platform Compound launched liquidity mining to detonate the market. The price of the governance token COMP soared to $400 in just a few days. Andre Cronje then published an article on how stable tokens can obtain high returns by using machine gun pools, and revealed that Yearn.Finance will issue governance tokens YFI, and all 30,000 YFI will be allocated to community mining. Although it was stated at the beginning of the launch of YFI that this was a completely worthless token, in the secondary market, YFI rose 10,000 times in 43 days, making Andre Cronje a god in one battle.
From then on, Andre Cronje became the "Satoshi Nakamoto" of the DeFi world. From this time on, the crypto world brought wealth to Andre Cronje. In the following year, Andre Cronje was not idle and developed projects crazily. Among them, the ones worth noting are Yearn Finance, Keep3r Network, Multichain, Chainlist, Solidly and Bribe crv Finance, etc., and he was also deeply involved in some projects, including Akropolish, Cover, Cream V2, Pickle, PowerPool and Sushiswap.
From 2020 to 2021, Andre Cronje is a god-like existence in the crypto world. As long as he makes an order, the token will rise like a rocket.
Controversy and the idea of quitting
Andre Cronje has received too many honors, but he was not rich. He entered the crypto world perhaps not for his ideals, but more for making money, so he has been frantically developing projects in the past two years, allowing many people to make money. Of course, he has also failed, but the leeks will praise you when they make money, and curse you once they lose money. This also made Andre Cronje tired of the crypto world. In addition, he has become financially free through the crypto world and does not need to work so hard anymore.
The most famous controversy about Andre Cronje is the NFT card game project Eminence (EMV). Since Eminence was untested and had loopholes, hackers stole 15 million DAI using flash loan attacks, which almost reduced the price of EMV to zero. Subsequently, the hacker transferred $8 million of the funds to the contract address of AC. This made Andre Cronje the focus, and many people firmly believed that Andre Cronje insisted on stealing the funds. Although Andre Cronje returned $8 million to users, it could not offset the attacks on him by users, and he once received death threats.
Another thing is that Andre Cronje began to try a new DeFi gameplay, offsetting the impermanent loss problem faced by AMM through liquidity governance, and introduced the LBI token model. "Scientists" entered the market early by calling the contract address posted at the end of Andre Cronje's article and continued to push up its price, up to 200 times. When many retail investors began to enter the market, the LBI price plummeted all the way. In just 6 hours, the LBI coin price returned to zero.
These made Andre Cronje feel exhausted, and he repeatedly called the DeFi community toxic. DeFi made me neglect my life, my health, and my mind.
Exit
On February 28, 2022, Andre Cronje's Twitter account @AndreCronjeTech could not be displayed, and there were rumors that he had deleted his Twitter account.
On March 4, 2022, Andre Cronje's LinkedIn profile showed that he had resigned from the Fantom Foundation and yearn.finance (last serving in February 2022), and currently only retains the position of founder of keep3r.finance.
On March 6, 2022, Anton Nell, senior solution architect at Fantom, revealed on social media that Andre Cronje and his team have decided not to continue contributing to the DeFi and Crypto fields, and the 25 protocols they developed will cease operations on April 3.
One stone stirs up a thousand waves, and the tokens of these projects have plunged due to Andre Cronje's departure.
In any case, Andre Cronje has made tremendous contributions to the crypto world in the past two years. He has transformed from a programmer struggling for life into an influential crypto tycoon. Some people say that his dream is to no longer worry about money, and some people say that his dream is to change the world. But no matter what, he is a shining star in the crypto world. Although there may be no more stories about him in the crypto world in the future, as long as newcomers enter the market, they will definitely hear his stories and even continue to use the projects he developed.
It is already a great success for a person to achieve this. I wish Andre Cronje all the best and thank him for his contribution.
