Cronje Quits Crypto, Abandons Fantom, Yearn Finance | Hacker News Reader

Cronje Quits Crypto, Abandons Fantom, Yearn Finance

thismorningonchain.com

94 pointsnscalf69 comments

He hasn't contributed to Yearn in over a year. Yearn is not shutting down, yearn.finance is very much still alive and has dozens of full time contributors and hundreds of part timers.

Yearn.fi, which is a UI wrapper made by Andre, is though. However, it's open source and can easily be forked and redeployed on a different domain.

A lot of these claims should be taken with a grain of salt. Bitcoin's founder famously quit one or two years in. Most of Cronje's creations will survive without him, as much as we hate to see him go.

It was about 3 years in with a handoff to Gavin Andresen, and decentralization around defi/web3 projects != btc's decentralization.

Yearn has more contributors than Bitcoin did at that point, tbh. I hate reading things like "Andre invented the fair launch" when, uh, that was clearly Satoshi, but as someone adjacent to Yearn, this isn't some random DeFi project.

Not super fair to compare contributor count then vs now; You could say the same about the Linux kernel or any major open source project of some history. World much bigger now. The kind of BTC contributor then was never about the money either, whereas I would say every ETH project ever (including the eth ico) was a cash grab, divorced from the cypherpunk roots.

It's called finance. It's a thing humans engage in, and you need smart contracts to actually enable that sort of activity without a trusted third party. Thanks to DEXes, aggregators, and protocols like ERC20 and ERC721, Ethereum's ecosystem is far less reliant on centralized actors than Bitcoin is.

Yearn Finance is listed in the article as one of the 25 projects being shit down on April 3rd. Could be a mistake by the journalist of course but do you have anything to back up your assertion that it’s not closing?

Think you're right, it's a mistake by the journalist. Here's a tweet[0] from Anton Nell, Andre's partner according to the journalist, saying what GP is saying: yearn.fi is shutting down but yearn.finance will continue to operate.

[0]: https://twitter.com/AntonNellCrypto/status/15004054752962969...

An interesting problem that I haven’t seen addressed is that, despite the marketing, web3/defi/crypto projects will be antithetical to “builder”/hacker types. Decentralized protocols are slow to develop by nature due to many people depending on them. If you’re developing Yearn finance, for example, no one wants you to do anything but make sure that stays running and delivering optimal returns. Once you have a project with supporters, it becomes impossible to leave or modify. Not so with a centralized project which can adapt quickly and “pivot.”

Moxie Marlinspike talked a bit about this in his talk “The ecosystem is moving.” Where Signal could implement video chats any time they wanted, distributed systems and protocols are hoist with their own petard: consensus. You must get community agreement and development on the new direction for anything meaningful to happen. This is both the strength and weakness of decentralized systems and one that is less suited to hacking and more to code review.

I can't help but think about all the non-web3 protocols this applies to, like email, html, etc. It's slower, but it's more powerful. While Signal could implement video chat any time, true...we don't need another closed video chat.

Decentralized systems are more powerful if governed properly, absolutely. But they won’t attract hacker types because they require ongoing maintenance and community consensus. When was the last email upgrade? HTTP and HTML have remained essentially the same their entire lives. Most of the people on the W3C are veterans, not “builders.”

Also Signal is open source, unless you have a different meaning of “closed video chat.”

they don't necessarily require ongoing maintenance, it depends how they are coded. some might even say the "correct" way is a non-upgradeable back-end (on-chain solidity contracts) and hash-addressed, ipfs hosted front-end. anyone can then pin the front-end themselves to ensure access or just run the code locally. dapps should rely on centralised, server based components as that mostly defeats the purpose.

uniswap is a good example. when they release an upgrade users must explicitly adopt the new version. in fact uniswap v1 and v2 still see usage despite the release of uniswap v3.

The Internet standards were built by "hacker types".

This can be done through a hybrid though, go off, build video chat, get some adoption and then leverage that to get consensus. “I’ve already done it this way I’m not changing it” is a dick move in an average PR request, but effective.

I was going to include this in my original comment and then deleted it, but you just described Netscape before Internet Explorer. You may enjoy the history of the img tag: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-origin-of-the-img-tag/

That's basically the BTC approach and it shows. Stable, but significantly more slower dev ecosystem. ETH, and by extension web3/defi are a result of builder/hacker types leaving BTC to get something more dev/app friendly.

What’s hilarious is consensus is effectively the path to “centralization” and build by committee.

When only a few coders are allowed to decide on design consensus, how a system works is out of the hands of users.

No different than politics and banks. Unfortunately for computer science minds, there is still a real world to crash into, not the endless void of infinitely big little numbers.

I don't think its related really and just happenstance. Its just a sign of market maturity that communities haven't accepted a survivorship or succession path that all organizations have to content with, instead of putting all their confidence on an unsociable do-it-all savant.

all of these founders should just leave en-masse and let people pick up the scraps. I love buying the dip on things that are misunderstood as codependant crypto traders freak out, has been my best trades.

(The current state of market maturity, market immaturity)

Andre is an innovator, both of protocols and token distribution methods. He invented the notion of a "fair launch" with YFI. Nobody was ever forced to interact with the contracts he published, they chose to. But of course he became a big figure and then got untold amounts of shit dumped on him.

Anyway, here's hoping he continues as an anon. That's really the only way. People are ridiculous.

Maybe this isn't the place to ask, but since the source of this wealth is "defi lending" and finding ways to max out APY, I have to ask why anyone would take out a line of credit at extraordinary interest rates in order to make all these staking schemes profitable?

The high yield isn't coming from high interest rates, generally they're being subsidized by the protocol to attract deposits. In fact, some these these subsidies pay you to borrow.

I was curious to this myself (I'm speaking more generally than any project). One reason I found is just to provide margin investing. So some company buys some $FOO and it goes up 10x. It may prefer to borrow stablecoins with it as collateral, even at a high rate. This way, investment can continue without selling (they may want to defer selling for liquidity or tax reasons, simply want to leverage and buy more etc)

If you can borrow token A at X% interest, but there is an opportunity to use that borrowed token and earn Y% interest, if Y is greater than X, you can make profit. This is a super simplified explanation but that's the gist of it. Basically defi is a gigantic game of rehypothecation.

crypto must certainly be the worlds biggest wealth generating machine if people are borrowing at 30%. that or its a pyramid scheme

It’s both. Pyramid schemes generate wealth for a subset of the pyramid.

just curious where you get the 30% figure. usdc borrowing on aave is 2.83% right now, which is practically reduced a further 0.97% by the AAVE incentives. most other stablecoins are in the same region.

Like a sibling said it might be more of a promotional rate thing since there are max lock-ups, but here's a Binance document [0] that advertises 20% for AVAX, NEAR, MATIC, and 70% for CAKE (never heard of it). Looking at CAKE, they have a max lockup of 10 coins for 90 days. So that's... $60 worth of crypto at 70% APR for 90/365 days ~= $10 profit max. Just like banks that offer a stunning 3% interest rate when you open a savings account (up to $3,000 for first 3 months etc etc)

[0] https://www.binance.com/en/support/announcement/2dd9fba94afd...

The rates aren't that high, and for people that trade volatility, yes it can be insanely profitable.

It also seems to be an economic niche that is 100% rents and 0% utility.

I love this assumption because this is why BlockFi, Nexo, Gemini and Coinbase Staking can offer people like 4% fixed, simply because its more believable.

Behind the scenes they use the capital deposited with them to get 30% and more, in these Defi protocols of the day, and just pocket the difference. Similar to banks, just with much wider yields.

"Why bother explaining just offer them something ‘super edgy’ like 3 percent higher than their bank gives!"

The pyramid scheme parts of crypto offer much larger percentages, by multiple orders of magnitude. Although each protocol has to be evaluated independently.

Typically these protocols earn from volume and size of transactions moving through other parts of the economy, as they take a cut while providing a service that makes it easier for volume to occur. They then just extrapolate the earnings over a prior time period, compared to the current amount of capital deposited with the protocol, and display a percentage return. These are not fixed returns as many factors can affect the actual return on capital.

One primary factor is that if there was more capital deposited then the % would be much lower. People don't deposit capital to that extent because there are so many other places to get higher than 30% yields. Its just a boomtown, the pie is really that big.

In traditional markets something similar occurs but people move capital chasing yields down to 2% or less. Using the same logic on the next opportunity "Oh I won't except 0.75%, I can get 2% on this other bond!"

That, and a lot of the pools will absolutely burn you with impermanent loss — plus more of a depreciating vanity token that the site included in the yield percentage. It’s a good racket — while some new shittoken is popular, get people to add your exit liquidity by pledging stablecoins and gas tokens to liquidity pools, borrow those pool claim tokens from the suckers (pay them “yield”), raid their liquidity, dump your shittokens, print more shittokens, “pay” the suckers with second set of shittokens, give them back their claim tokens (which are now mostly a claim on the first lot of shittokens), sucker goes to claim their winnings (their original capital) and is left with a big bag of worthless shittokens. And you have their ether, bnb, matic, stablecoins. 100% APY tho

facts, and thats just the consensual transactions

its actually kind of crazy about the ones that yank all of the liquidity and disappear, when they make enough from just the “normal” ponzi operation

there are a couple that are sustainable models

Earning Trade fees on stables seems the most legit, and doesn’t require another token as a reward. I’m not convinced staking rewards as a service can work over a longer tail, what ever happened to masternodes as a service lol… Still a lot of capital going there now.

It’s interesting to see what happens when incentives end on the platforms that don’t just run away with customer funds. 98% of the capital is in place today because of incentives. These all must end eventually.

> A at X% interest, but there is an opportunity to use that borrowed token and earn Y% interest, if Y is greater than X, you can make profit.

This is how arbitrage works. But wouldn't the arbitrage opportunities disappear if enough people know that this token yields more elsewhere? Surely the market prices would adjust accordingly.

One thing that I've noticed is that Y% is often a constantly moving target whereas X% is a bit more static.

The arbitrage opportunities can and do dry up. Typically the larger the arb, the faster it dries up, at which point you're back to earning X% but with more overheads. At most you can probably be sitting on Y% for a few months before you need to find a new strategy.

There's gotta be someone at the end of this chain getting the shrift

Like the dotcom bubble where advertisers were selling advertisement to advertisets

There's a ton of reasons.

Arbitrage

- Borrowing, swapping and paying back in the same function call.

Liquid Staking

- Say i have a POS coin. When i stake i secure the network with collatoral and get paid a certain APR. But now that token is stuck staking. But if you create a smart contract the aggregates the coins together, stakes them and loan them out to represent their underlying value, you get slight divergence between the total value in the smart contract and your underlying ownership in it. So now i have this Liquid X coin, that is rising in value at a set rate to normal X Coin. So now, i can then go and utilize the underlying value of the Liquid coin by utilize it as collatoral to mint more X_Coin. Rinse and repeat until you are at a respectable collateralization ratio.

Not precisely what you’re asking for, and about Compound/Uniswap rather than this bundle, but I made a comment a while ago explaining some of the core dynamics of defi lending.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348136

The epigraph reminded me of this, from Alice Through the Looking Glass [1]:

--- start quote ---

The name of the song is called "Haddocks' Eyes".'

'Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel interested.

'No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little vexed. 'That's what the name is called. The name really is "The Aged Aged Man".'

'Then I ought to have said "That's what the song is called"?' Alice corrected herself.

'No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called "Ways and Means": but that's only what it's called, you know!'

'Well, what is the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

'I was coming to that,' the Knight said. 'The song really is "A-sitting On a Gate": and the tune's my own invention.'

--- end quote ---

[1] https://sabian.org/looking_glass8.php

I have never heard of any of these entities. Were they big?

Solidity is the dominant language to write smart contracts. See https://github.com/ethereum/solidity

The entity that is referred to in the article as shutting down is 'Solidly'

Solidity was not mentioned in the article or this comment thread (aside from your comment).

I'm not really into the ecosystem but I do read about it once in a while and I did hear about "yearn" for sure. So I think they aren't that small.

I found it hard to tell which words were and were not part of proper nouns, and which were organizations or things and which were people, in this headline. It reads like gibberish.

As is common when someone is not familiar with an industry or concept, titles become hard to read.

To help you, I have made the names in italics and then even you could maybe understand this title.

> Cronje Quits Crypto, Abandons Fantom, Yearn Finance

Speaking about titles, what do you think about this one?

> Enhanced Cycling Stability of Macroporous Bulk Antimony‐Based Sodium‐Ion Battery Anodes Enabled through Active/Inactive Composites

How am I (or you), a person who have no experience in whatever the subject is about, supposed to know what it is about?!

Absolute gibberish! Or maybe, a title is written for people who are actually in that industry?

The second is much easier to read as a layperson because it contains punctuation, articles, and prepositions.

Your example is much easier to parse, and I know far less about that than about the industry in the HN title.

yearn finance had as much as $5B locked in assets

source: https://www.defipulse.com/projects/yearn.finance

and dumped on the top 20 protocols he promised would get airdrops, pumped for exit liquidity and so is now worth 9 figures

he made $2 billion in 2 years and fucked over a huge amount of people

Anyone report him to the SEC and DOJ Crypto enforcement division yet?

This is perfectly legal

Crypto is the wild west. They've worked very hard to ensure DeFi isn't categorized as a security so the SEC has no jurisdiction.

That is not an accurate representation of the legal obligations of jurisdiction participants.

https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/attorney-general-william-p-ba...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/deputy-attorney-general-lisa-...

And tell them what?

"Hey, I gave real money to this guy and agreed to accept magic beans in return. Now I have discovered that I can no longer redeem these beans for cash"

"Hey, I gave real money to this guy who sold me what falls under SEC regulation as a security due to the Howey Test [1] [2]. I would like them investigated for securities fraud."

It's easy. I've filed such complaints myself. I've bought securities knowingly defective to file the complaints when I was aware fraud existed. Bitcoin and Ethereum fail the Howey Test, but if someone steals them from you, you can still legally pursue for the theft of your digital commodity (or tangentially, the laundering of those funds if the theft and laundering are done by separate parties [3]).

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/corpfin/framework-investment-contract-an...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/peirce-how-we-howey-050919

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30260787

do you know of a link to the timeline of events and mis-steps etc?

Source?

Good for him.

I can’t blame him at all.

Code is law and all that.

The antiwork wolf of Wall St

As I said before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29039690

Everyone who followed this guy gets what they deserve. Dude is a nut job

Sounds like you've misquoted/mischaracterized him in your link.

"“Test in prod”, I have come to regret this statement, anyone that has listened to some of my interviews, will know I have this statement so that people use caution. It exists to deter people from just using systems without investigation. It does NOT mean that I don’t test... [goes onto explain 5 stages of testing]."

https://andrecronje.medium.com/unpacking-my-involvement-in-d...

Is Cronje rich as a result of his efforts?

Did he also make others rich?

Who benefited the most of his DeFi efforts? Which one succeeded the most?

I don't understand, did he or didn't he make money then? Articles about this make it sound like he made nothing and is in debt, but he's also a billionaire?

Cronje definitely made money, he was one of the originators of the DeFi space. He contributed a great deal as a developer, and has famously been very annoyed by the politics and drama of the space. There's probably something to be said about the way he left the projects, but it would be very unfair to categorize this as a pump and dump.

The price is still in the $20k range, which I guess shows the power or benefits of decentralized governance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com