On December 6, someone posted a screenshot of the crypto assets market on Weibo. In addition to the two major “hard currencies” of BTC and ETH, there were also KP3R, CRV, HEGIC, COVER and SUSHI. The blogger wrote that at a glance, AC coins have risen the most, “really, DeFi has become popular again.”
This “AC”, who brought explosions to multiple DeFi assets on his own, is the abbreviation of Andre Cronje. Five months ago, his most well-known identity was the founder of Yearn.Finance, a liquidity mining aggregation protocol. The governance token of this protocol, YFI, rose from a few US dollars to 40,000 US dollars. It took 2 months to complete Bitcoin. 8 years of increase.
YFI is on fire, and Andre Cronje is on fire. After that, although he felt distressed by two outside questions, even announced that he would withdraw from the DeFi field, and disappeared from Twitter for a while, but Andre Cronje, who “likes to splice things together and see what happens”, is back again , And made a big move.
On December 1, when news of the merger between Yearn Finance and Sushiswap, another well-known trading agreement, came out, the market shook and the two currencies rose in a row. Andre Cronje, who loves “splicing”, did not stop. People found that he merged many agreements with YFI like a “Lego master”, and the splicing hand also extended to Polkadot.
Together with his own development of the smart contract task network Keep3r and the transaction Dwap protocol, Andre Cronje is building a DeFi kingdom with scenarios including lending, trading, insurance and derivatives. In total, at least 10 agreements have been marked with the “AC label”.
The currency associated with it has also been flying in price recently, and the folks have said: build a DeFi and sell it to AC.
But is the “DeFi Lego” built like this safe? Andre Cronje said that there will be bugs, “But the construction makes me happy, I will make mistakes, if you don’t understand, don’t use it.”
AC shot DeFi aggregation
On December 1, Andre Cronje (AC) announced the merger of Yearn.Finance and Sushiswap on Twitter. On the same day, SUSHI rose from 1.5 US dollars to 1.96 US dollars, an increase of 30%, and then soared to a high of 2.37 US dollars, the currency price hit a new high in nearly three months. The YFI rose from 25,608 US dollars to 28,291 US dollars, and closed at 26,469 US dollars, an intraday increase of 2.76%.
“What does this mean? M&A in the DeFi field?” Someone asked after seeing the news.
One is the best aggregation tool for liquidity mining this year, and the other is a decentralized trading platform that has always wanted to surpass the “king” Uniswap. What do you need to do when the two merge?
According to AC’s statement, what the two parties integrate is development resources and total lock-up value (TVL). There are also big moves for the strong alliance. SushiSwap will also help Yearn Finance develop a new project Deriswap, which can integrate different financial scenarios on DeFi, such as swap trading, futures, lending and other services on one platform.
In addition, AC’s self-developed Keep3r will also be integrated into Sushiswap. The smart contract project requires external entities to help solve tasks such as price feeding. Keep3r can provide compensation for those who accept and complete the task. On December 3, AC announced that it would use the Chainlink oracle to extend Keep3r, adding to the security performance.
In fact, integration with Sushiswap is not the first merger led by AC. In the previous week, the Year Finance he created had merged 4 DeFi agreements, namely Pickle Finance, a copy of YFI, Cream Finance, a fork of the loan agreement Compound, and Cover for insurance scenarios. It seems that the agreement on Ethereum can no longer satisfy AC, and Akropolis, which is similar to the banking scene in the Polkadot network, has also been integrated into YFI by him.
Unlike traditional corporate mergers and acquisitions, AC emphasized, “Is this a merger, acquisition, cooperation, partnership, etc.? I don’t have an answer here.” He gave a relatively simple explanation, “Each Part of the project will merge with the teams, the agreements will also leverage each other, and the team members will all share a common vision. This is new and I think it may not be suitable for our previous practices.”
Although the outside world cannot know how the financial accounts of the parties are calculated, after a group of agreements “hand in hand” under the leadership of AC, their respective token prices fly first. According to non-small numbers, within a week, Keep3r increased by 129%, Cover was 163%, AKRO increased by 35%, Cream was 46%, and SUSHI was 47%.
In the DeFi enthusiast group, some people sang and made a slogan:
——What can make money if you want to start a business?
-Make a DeFi agreement and sell it to AC.
Some players sighed after seeing the merger of the DeFi agreement, “It is difficult for ordinary DeFi modules to survive independently, and they can only wait for AC to incorporate.”
Andre Cronje’s shot is like an “AC label” in the DeFi world in the eyes of the outside world.
“Lego Masters” can’t afford DeFi
In August of this year, one month after Year.Finance was developed by himself, Andre Cronje said in an interview with the media that what YFI does is aggregation, “I like to put things together and see what happens. Lego currency is a long time One of the coolest things that came up.” Before that, he worked in the fintech industry.
Andre Cronje, who loves to play “Currency Lego”, actually studied law. According to public reports from the media, computers are self-taught for AC and started his career as a programmer. He has worked in communication technology and mobile network security, covering areas including bank payments and big data.
After working in the Fintech (financial technology) industry for three or four years, AC came into contact with a distributed consensus project in 2016. Initially, the encrypted media website CryptoBriefing was a place he frequented. He would share code reviews of some projects for people to learn.
Later, when the ICO was popular, speculators regarded AC’s review as a basis for looking at the project and investment advice, which made him a little sad and disgusted.
This inevitably reminds people of his risk tips after creating Yearn.Finance. After the agreement produced 30,000 YFI governance tokens with no pre-mining, no crowdfunding, no team rewards, and pure liquidity mining, AC publicly stated that “it is a completely worthless token.” But this failed to prevent YFI from being speculated in the secondary market for a price higher than BTC.
At first, Yearn.Finance just helped users to automatically adjust the asset location according to the rate of return in the popular liquidity mining agreement to obtain high returns. As a result, accidentally became the most prominent wave of the DeFi heat wave in 2020. AC probably didn’t expect that an agreement he wrote for the convenience of others created a market value of hundreds of millions in a few months. He himself was evaluated by the industry platform as the “smartest DeFi builder”.
Trouble also followed. First, in August this year, a researcher in the crypto industry named Hasu expressed doubts about AC, “When we see a person holding $40 million, I think this is a potential risk. People should at least consider before investing. a bit.”
Although AC thinks “I believe he just wants to help,” he also confided on Medium with grievances, “I just don’t understand why everyone is so opposed to my project but so concerned about my project. (Ethereum) there There are millions of dollars in VC fundraising projects, those projects can immediately steal funds and run away, and some are active scams, and I just created Yearn.finance on my own, and I didn’t raise much money on my own. He doesn’t charge a penny, but he has to be attacked 24 hours a day.” He called DeFi a toxic community and once told the media that he would withdraw from the DeFi industry.
But he didn’t really withdraw. In order to avoid suspicion, he transferred the control of Year.finance user funds to a community-controlled wallet.
Sticky warning: there are bugs, don’t play if you don’t understand
After the collection of “AC labels”, Year.Finance’s own functions are becoming more and more powerful and diversified, and the price of the governance token YFI has stepped out of the trough. As of 6 pm on December 7, YFI temporarily reported $28,142, an increase of 9% in the past 7 days and an increase of 205% in the month.
Regardless of the merger or splicing, the biggest risk of DeFi Lego is still the security issue. Even the “Great God” AC cannot guarantee no loopholes.
On November 23, Pickle was hacked and lost 20 million DAI. This is one of the agreements that AC has since merged.
In early October, AC disappeared from Twitter for a period of time. The reason was related to a DeFi security incident on September 29. The game project Eminence he had pointed out suffered a lightning loan attack. A total of US$15 million in user funds were stolen and the EMV price was almost zero.
Strangely, the hacker transferred the $8 million in stolen money to Andre Cronje’s personal address.
Although AC returned the US$8 million in funds to the user since then, doubts came again. Some people believed that this was theft by the guard and accused him of being a “liar.” Someone even issued death threats to him.
Of course, AC’s supporters and the community also supported him and expressed their appreciation for his work.
Fortunately, this DeFi Lego fan didn’t really leave, he came back again. In November and December, multiple agreements were successively completed, and a DeFi kingdom with multiple financial application scenarios such as trading, insurance, and derivatives was formed.
Since Eminence, AC seems to have become a “black finger”. In October, he wrote an article about the new project Liquidity Income (LBI), saying that liquidity governance can be used to eliminate arbitrage losses. After the article was published, “scientists” called the contract address posted at the end of the AC article to enter the market in advance to manipulate currency prices to make profits. According to media reports, LBI rose to a maximum of 200 times at that time, and then fell sharply. Within 6 hours, the LBI currency price returned to zero, and many investors who chased the high were ensnared.
Today, the DeFi Lego Kingdom built by AC has emerged, but the security risks still cannot be ignored. He himself may also be fed up with the trouble caused by KOL status.
He posted a statement on Twitter-I built the software for myself, if you are sure to stick to it, please be cautious, there will still be bugs. It will make me happy that these agreements are built. I also make mistakes. If you don’t understand, please don’t use it.
