Editor’s note: As the founder of DeFi, YFI has his own worries. He has been walking on thin ice in the process of doing yearn.finance, for fear that loopholes in his code will cause losses to others. A contract account holds huge assets. If a loophole in the contract occurs and is discovered by hackers, it is very likely that he will be caught. “, Andre said, “Doing DeFi makes me scared.” Come into this serial entrepreneur and feel the heartbeat of the DeFi world.
01 YFI: A month to complete the 10-year journey of Bitcoin
How fast is the development of the uncle (YFI) department? Uncle (YFI) one day, DeFi one year;
DeFi one day, one year in the circle;
One day in the circle, one year in the world.
In fact, this description is not an exaggeration at all. Some people have divided DeFi into generations:
First generation: MKR ZRX KNC; Second generation: LEND, SNX, REN; Third generation: CRV BAL UMA; Fourth generation: YFI, YFII, YFV.
If you have heard of YFI and used it, congratulations! It means that you are the fourth generation user in DeFi.
YFI is the governance token of the year.finance project. There is no pre-mining, pre-sale, and no reservation by the team. It is only allocated to users who provide liquidity for yToken. It strives to be the most decentralized token.
yearn.finance is an aggregation platform, an aggregator of decentralized financial management protocols. It bridges decentralized borrowing platforms such as Aave, Compound, and dYdX, and automatically swaps positions among many agreements based on the level of revenue of each platform to capture the highest revenue . That is, yearn.finance can automatically select the platform with the highest revenue.
YFI’s growth rate is very exaggerated. It is one million times the currency in 2020, which makes many people stunned. Although its founder repeatedly emphasized that his governance token is “worthless,” it still cannot prevent YFI from skyrocketing by 40 in one day. Times, YFI’s more than one month increase is equal to BTC’s 10-year increase .
Not only did the YFI skyrocket, but it also led to the collective skyrocketing of the entire YFI system, and various uncles, etc. all experienced a certain degree of rise.
Obviously, the price of YFI must have a frothy component. In the face of the market’s hype for YFI, the founder of yearn.finance came forward and poured cold water. He believes that the YFI token is valued at $3, the DeFi market is in a greedy stage, and people are more speculative.
02 Andre Cronje: serial entrepreneur
Andre Cronje majored in law. He actually wanted to be a defense lawyer at the beginning, but by chance, Andre Cronje completed a three-year computer science course in about 6 months. This has laid a solid foundation for future entrepreneurship.
Andre Cronje also worked as telecommunications systems, mobile development, lending and insurance business done in the field of Fintech, big data, he also tried to process and automated way to do high consensus can be seen in these occupations and later The yearn.finance is somewhat related.
Andre was exposed to blockchain technology for the first time. It will be 2017 and 2018. It is said that his best buddies are married and honeymoon. Andre feels very boring, so he began to read a lot of blockchain-related content. He said it was his pivotal moment.
Since then, in order to find out whether some projects are really as the official said, such as how the performance is and how high the TPS is, Andre Cronje began to audit and analyze the code by himself, and shared some of his analysis results on the Internet in the form of articles. For example, there are technical articles shared by Andre Cronje on Medium.
Andre Cronje shared more and more articles, and more and more people followed him. His technical level has also been widely recognized in the industry. However, some readers used his article as investment advice for 1C0 speculation, which made him very sad, because this was not the original intention of his article to share.
Andre Cronje’s reputation is getting bigger and bigger. Friends around him who are interested in cryptocurrency also want to invest in cryptocurrency to make money, but they have no experience in cryptocurrency investment, so everyone hopes that Andre can help them manage their own funds, Andre Cronje is also happy to help his family and friends, so Andre takes care of their assets.
Andre Cronje’s investment strategy is different from that of others. After the big bull market in 2017, the entire market is relatively sluggish. In a bear market cycle, the prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are falling.
Andre Cronje also experienced the turbulent period in 2019. He did not want to hold a bunch of cryptocurrency assets with relatively large price fluctuations, so he replaced all the cryptocurrencies in his hands with stable currencies , such as USDT and USDC. And DAI etc.
Although holding stablecoins is “stable” and is not affected by the fluctuation of cryptocurrency prices, the rate of return is a problem. There is no essential difference between holding stablecoins and holding legal currencies. Andre Cronje, who is diligent in practice, did not let the stablecoin in his hand idle, but looked for various opportunities to increase its value. He spent a lot of time and energy to manage these funds.
As we all know, DeFi projects on ETH started relatively early, and many ETH DeFi have been implemented since the last wave of bull market. For example, the current star DeFi projects on ETH such as MakerDAO, Uniswap, Synthetix, etc., have also been deployed earlier, and the ETH public chain The functions of the DeFi project on the Internet are relatively complete, and functions such as financial management and mortgage lending have been completed. Of course, this also benefits from the development of the ETH ecosystem.
It is precisely because of the relatively complete functions of ETH DeFi products such as financial management and borrowing that Andre Cronje can look for various stable currency financial opportunities. He always manually transfers everyone’s funds to the place with the highest interest rate. As a tossing person, Andre quickly realized that manually transferring money between different DeFi platforms is indeed too cumbersome. He can solve this problem with smart contracts:
As long as the user puts the cryptocurrency funds in the liquidity pool, combines it with the smart contract, and uses it to compare the annualized return rates of different borrowing platforms, and then according to factors such as the level of return and security, between different financial management platforms Automatically transfer funds between, thereby grabbing higher cryptocurrency financial management income.
Andre did what he said. In order to help relatives and friends manage their cryptocurrency assets, Andre wrote code around the clock. He did the analysis and calculation automation of the yield rate of Synthetix, Compound, Balancer, and mStable. This is what we did later. The well-known Yearn.finance.
In fact, in addition to yearn.finance and the recently launched insurance function yinsure.finance, according to the information provided by Andre in Medium and podcast events, yearn’s follow-up may also launch ytrade, yswap, etc. Out of consideration for high-risk and irrational investments by users, Andre said that a lot of information has not yet been disclosed.
03 Andre Cronje: “DeFi makes me scared”
The first is financial pressure . This is a problem encountered by many entrepreneurs in the initial stage. Andre is no exception. Creating yearn.finance cost him more than $40,000, and then Andre invested in audits and holding events. Twice the amount of funds, and at that time owed about $20,000 in debt.
The second is the mental pressure . He has been walking on thin ice in the process of doing yearn.finance, for fear that loopholes in his own code will cause losses to others. A contract account holds huge assets. If a loophole in the contract is discovered by hackers, it is very You may be “snatched”, Andre said, “Doing DeFi makes me scared.”
In addition, with the success of yearn.finance and the skyrocketing price of YFI, more and more funds have poured into YFI. Andre is also worried about participants FOMO, and worried that participants will all bet on YFI tokens, which gives Andre It brought tremendous pressure. For this reason, he repeatedly emphasized in the top tweets that he may make mistakes and the code may have loopholes. Please use it with caution.
04 Andre Cronje: “I do mine, leave the rest to the community”
“He is just an independent developer. He is the only one from the beginning to the end of the entire project, but users hope that he can act as a 24-hour customer service. There are so many scams on Ethereum, so many escrow businesses, and he is just creating yearn.finance, they didn’t even charge a penny at the time, but they were attacked 24 hours a day.”
Andre said that what he wants to do more is to try, and the results will be left to the community.
“I like to think. I did a good job and very fast in the prototype stage of an idea, but I couldn’t do the product. This is why I handed over the year to the Waifu community. I believe the community can do a better job for me. Prototype commercialization.”
“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.”
Andre said so.
