Yearn.Finance is managing a leadership transition right now and it looks like it is doing it effectively. Andre Cronje, the prolific programmer and creator of Yearn, said he has abandoned the project - and decentralized finance (DeFi) entirely.
Cronje motivated his choice by saying: “I'm not building anything anymore. I do it because I'm passionate, but if people use my test environments, and then lose money and hold me responsible, it means that there is 0 upside and only risk for me ”.
The reference is to an event that occurred in September, when some users have invested in a smart contract under development, losing money and blaming Cronje for what happened, which proved too much for the developer.
Effective transition
Yearn.Finance is the leading robo advisor for performance in DeFi and the pioneer of the “fair launch” concept that proved so powerful this summer. But “Yearn's strongest asset is its incredible community that has coalesced in a short period of time,” said Spencer Noon, of DTC Capital.
"I am extremely confident that the project will continue to thrive, even if for some reason Andre has decided to leave the project." As Cronje explained, thanks to the commission built within Yearn, which supplies the token treasury, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) now has the funds to support a staff that can carry on its work.
“Now the YFI team has to take over,” he wrote. "I mean, they have about 20 people employed full time and very well paid." Cronje said he distributed all the code that runs DeFi's Yearn portal. He became somewhat legendary in the crypto industry, creating Yearn's governance token, YFI, which was valued at up to $ 43.000 and is currently worth nearly 2 BTC.
An accusation that Cronje did not bear
Cronje informed the staff that he was leaving, making a private communication on the company's Telegram channel and begging participants not to share the news with the media.
This happened on October 1st and Cronje was clearly frustrated by something that had happened in the previous 24 hours. While he was building a smart contract for the Yearn community called Eminence.Finance, users saw the contract and started sending money to us, despite no one but Cronje knowing what it was.
He said he did not expect the DeFi community to "put about 15 million [in its smart contract] without any announcements, documentation, website or understanding of how it works."
Following the hack, he claimed to have received threats from those who blamed him as responsible for the attack. Cronje was amazed at how reckless people were to send money to a smart contract before he declared it ready. The fact that they have done so is indicative of how obsessive some retail investors have become in seeking yield.
