In the crypto world in 2020, AC (Andre Cronje) is the absolute protagonist.
In the past half month, the South African has continuously led the merger of five projects he founded Yearn with Pickle, Cream, Cover, Akropolis, SushiSwap and so on.
With each merger, the corresponding currency prices have risen sharply, from 30% to 80%.
Developers, artists, engineers, creators… Just like every upstart who has risen to fame, AC is labeled with various identities and various labels.
The doubters say that he is the next BM, and his image collapses in an instant; the believers support him as Musk and Satoshi Nakamoto in the DeFi world.
People love him, hate him, and want to stop. Some people liken this state to PUA.
Uncover the true face of AC, what kind of character is this? What kind of DeFi world does he want to create? Is this good or bad for the DeFi world?
God or public enemy in DeFi world?
In the early days of Bitcoin, there was the Bite religion who believed in fundamentalism. In 2020, the AC religion came into being.
They were born or initiated by Andre Cronje (hereinafter referred to as AC)’s first DeFi project Yearn (YFI).
From July 17th to September 13th, YFI rose from US$3 to US$43,000, “the 10-year market of Bitcoin in two months”.
The myth of YFI has helped AC capture a large number of investors.
These investors are mainly “scientists”. They believe in him, follow him, and expect him to create the next YFI and the next ten thousand times currency.
No matter what new project he releases, they rush into the market before waiting. They often don’t even know what the project does, so they rush in when they get the contract address.
Even a like from AC can be interpreted as a wealth code.
On September 29, AC liked the Tweet of Eminence.finance (EMN) twice on Twitter. After the investor sees the like, he will send the funds to the EMN contract address.
At this time, the EMN is still in the testing phase, and the contract has not passed the security audit. Hackers used contract loopholes to steal nearly 15 million yuan.
Soon after the EMN incident, AC introduced the newly designed token model Liquidity Income (LBI) in Medium, which aims to reduce impermanence losses.
As scientists squeezed into the contract and pushed up the price of the currency, the LBI price once rose to $1344, then fell to $0.3 within a few seconds, and then plummeted to $0.0045 overnight.
At this time, what AC did was still shrouded in the brilliance and shadow of YFI, and everyone called him the founder of YFI or the father of YFI. AC broke away from YFI’s halo and became a self-contained concept starting at the end of October.
On October 29th, Keep3r Network, a decentralized chain service outsourcing network developed by AC, released the V1 beta version with the token name KP3R. The initial price was 0.0035 ETH, and after 6 hours, the price was 0.373 ETH, an increase of more than a hundred times.
This time, KP3R did not plummet after the surge. As of press time, the price of KP3R has stabilized at around $444.
Then, on November 10, AC announced that YFI and Hegic, a decentralized options platform, would cooperate. After the announcement, Hegic surged 30% in a short time.
On November 23, AC announced the launch of Deriswap, a trading platform integrating functions such as exchange, options and loans. “Just like the cross-chain reconstruction of the public chain track, Deriswap is a higher-level dimensionality reduction integration.” A crypto analyst said.
From November 24 to December 1, AC successively announced the integration of YFI with Pickle, Cream, Cover, Akropolis, and Sushi. The corresponding project tokens showed a short-term increase of 20% to 80%. Pickle rose by 80%, Cream rose by 70%, Sushi rose by 30%… This seems impressive in the flat currency market.
After a series of bombings, everyone discovered that AC was not going to do the next YFI, but to subvert the entire DeFi system.
At this moment, the founder of YFI retires, and AC and AC concepts (universe, empire) appear. In addition to scientists, more individual investors have joined AC teachers and become AC believers.
The believers flock to AC. They believe in him and follow him. No matter what AC releases, they will rush into the field. That means wealth.
At present, the AC concept has encompassed the circuit of swap transactions, options, lending, insurance, aggregators, etc. Investors are speculating about who will be the next AC concept. Investing in advance means seizing the dividends.
“AC’s combination of DeFi is still poor: stablecoins and cross-chain assets.” Investor Wu Yi said that he is planning to “contain” AC in these two areas.
AC has become the most famous person in the DeFi world. Among the top 10 DeFi projects with locked positions, three are related to AC: Curve, SushiSwap, and YFI.
The believers advocated AC as Musk and Satoshi Nakamoto in DeFi, and the “infidels” called it the next BM, waiting for the day when the bubble burst.
AC, the next BM?
Since the establishment of YFI, the doubts on AC have never disappeared, but have intensified.
After Yearn, Andre also developed or participated in the development of Eminence, Liquidity Income, Keep3R, Deriswap (not online) and other projects.
For ordinary people, it is difficult to develop and operate a project, but for AC, participating in the development and operation of 10 projects seems like a heavy lifting.
In the Superman universe, there is a warning saying “the greater the ability, the greater the responsibility”, which seems to be being practiced by AC. AC is also known as the “currency madman”. He opened up Xinjiang territory regardless of cost or cost.
In addition to developing and operating multiple projects at the same time, AC is also known for “not focusing on the value of tokens.”
“People have realized that the product is a lie, and that being adopted is a lie. All these products are rubbish, and now tokens are new products.” He reflected on IC0’s lessons in an interview.
After YFI went online, it showed a ten-thousand-fold increase. AC said at the time that it was not interested in the sky-high price of YFI, and instead poured cold water and said that the actual value of YFI was zero.
“I don’t serve speculators.” AC posted, “Tokens are designed for a specific system, and the price is not important.”
Relying on the myth of ten thousand times currency, without reservation and without additional issuance, AC is like the Jesus of DeFi world.
On the other hand, AC has been questioned by price.
On September 29, a hacker’s lightning loan attack on the EMN volume approached $15 million, and then returned $8 million to the AC account.
AC’s reputation was severely damaged, and some people even issued death threats to AC. AC was silent for more than 10 days.
AC wrote in the Twitter brief: “I test in prod.” He was referring to testing new products on the Ethereum network. According to AC’s test trajectory, investors poured in before the test product went online. This was the main reason AC was accused.
And AC likes to test directly on the mainnet. For him, showing his testing process on the main network is equivalent to creating a piece of art in public in public.
“If you don’t understand it, please don’t use it.” Although AC stated the risk in the top of Twitter, this cannot stop people from chasing wealth. People love and hate AC.
Someone compares AC and EOS’s BM (Daniel Larimer): BM is also a “currency demon”. It has issued or participated in the issuance of Bitshares, Steemit, EOS and other projects, and has entered the ranks of the top 10 cryptocurrency market capitalization. EOS It raised more than 4 billion US dollars.
After the EOS mainnet went live, as the investment insider behind the parent company Block.one was exposed and the EOS currency price fell, BM also fell to the altar.
Will AC repeat the mistakes of BM?
“AC and BM are both traffic stars of the times, but AC has achieved synergy of merging different projects to achieve higher capital efficiency.” Crypto blogger “Explore Cat” believes.
But the author observes that compared to BM building an empire, AC clearly does not aim for this. In his eyes, DeFi is more like a Lego game.
AC’s Lego game
It is worth mentioning that the YFI with a market value of 5 billion today is made by AC alone, not a company or a team.
YFI originated from the investment needs of AC and friends around. “Yearn’s thing is actually because I have a small stablecoin portfolio myself, and I try to manage it as a savings account,” he said in the FTX podcast on July 29th. He prefers stablecoins and doesn’t. Deal with impermanence loss.
DeFi makes it possible for AC to start a business on its own. The various DeFi protocols are composable. Jesse Walden, the founder of Variant Fund, defines composability as: If the existing resources of a platform can be used for construction and programmed into higher-level applications, then this platform It is composable.
The composability of DeFi projects is important because it allows developers to do more with fewer resources, which in turn can lead to faster and more complex innovations.
“DeFi allows us to cooperate, coexist, and become individuals. We don’t know what we should call it, but I am very excited about this model,” AC said.
After successively announcing cooperation with multiple projects, AC is considered to pile up Lego in the DeFi world, just like his favorite game “World of Warcraft”.
“Compared with playing product games, playing token games wastes too much time, energy and capital. In the long run, product games are good for tokens,” AC said.
Looking back at what AC did in DeFi, like collecting equipment in a game, breaking through levels, and getting game rewards: the pleasure of dopamine, the cheers of the believers.
This also explains why AC has participated in the operation and construction of more than 10 projects and still enjoys it.
“Once I find some interesting theories, I want to try them and see if they work. If they work, I will be very happy. After the puzzle is solved, I will be very satisfied, and I will complete what I want to do. I will leave after the incident, and the community will continue to do what I cannot do.” AC said.
However, the DeFi world does not always provide timely feedback like games.
“Waiting for feedback is very painful. It feels like a’wasted’ time and new work cannot be started.” A week ago, AC said on Twitter that it was painful to wait for feedback on tests such as Pickle, Cream, and Cover.
This seems to be a game that AC enjoys alone, but in the eyes of other DeFi people, AC is not that popular.
The head of MakerDAO China described this process as AC to DeFi’s PUA, “AC to DeFi is like PUA to love”.
“The AC stall is so big, and I don’t know how to end it in the future. It’s easy to get started and difficult to build. AC just likes doing things, but doesn’t like doing things.” YFII preacher and Digital Renaissance Foundation Cao Yin said.
Compared with YFI’s violent merger movement, YFII’s reaction is much more cautious. YFII only recently announced its first merger project, Unisave, and plans to implement it in 2021.
AC also admitted this. He once said: “I like thinking. I did a good job and fast in the prototype stage of an idea, but I couldn’t make the product. This is why I gave the yearn to the Waifu community. , I believe that the community can better productize the prototype I made.”
In fact, some of AC’s followers have gradually awakened from the madness. “AC is slowly selling credit.” Wu Yi said.
No one knows how long AC’s Lego game will last.
“DeFi makes me ignore my life, my health, and my mind. I have to put it first.” AC said, “I have no vision, I have no plan. Now it is very interesting, but maybe a It becomes very boring after a month, and I may go home to play World of Warcraft.”
What will the DeFi world leave before AC leaves?
“From the perspective of what AC did, he promoted the early DEFI industry and created the YFI myth. From this step alone, the development of the entire DEFI is indelible, and the various project proposals he made later, including mergers Many projects are the key points of the industry’s urgent need to solve, so in the future, regardless of whether AC can recreate myths, the AC ecosystem has been formed. As for the results, we need to learn and research.” Bitouq principal Chen Mo said.
Perhaps as AC said, even if the project fails, the value of the attempt is greater than all critics believe.
