DeFi "Godfather" Andre Cronje quits the encryption field

DeFi architect, Fantom Foundation technical advisor, and Yearn Finance founder Andre Cronje has left the decentralized finance (DeFi) space after deactivating his Twitter account.

Cronje’s colleague at the Fantom Foundation, Anton Nell, said in a March 6 tweet that both he and Cronje would be leaving the crypto space. However, there are concerns about the fate of the roughly 25 decentralized applications (dApps) and services they have run so far. Fantom Opera is a Layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution.

Affected applications and services include yearn.fi, keep3r.network, multichain.xyz, chainlist.org, bride.crv.finance, and solidly.exchange.

The community reaction to Nell's announcement was generally sympathetic, as many understood that the duo might need a break from the rigors of their jobs. Other disgruntled investors didn’t take kindly to token price and TVL rhetoric.

Fantom CEO Michael Kong clarified the consequences of Cronje and Nell's resignations. While Cronje has been instrumental in creating many projects, Kong said in a March 7 tweet that "these projects haven't stopped developing. Some of them have been running independently for years."

Banteg, Yearn Finance’s lead developer, also chimed in to reassure users and investors that Andre’s departure would have little impact on the DeFi yield aggregator’s day-to-day operations.

Yearn (YFI) and Fantom (FTM) prices plummeted immediately after Nell’s tweet. According to data from CoinGecko, YFI is currently down about 10% to $18,187, while FTM is down 20% to $1.33.

While Yearn’s total value locked (TVL) has remained flat at $3 billion, Fantom TVL has dropped 40% since March 3 to $7.16 billion. According to DeFiLlama, the TVL of Cronje’s latest project, Solidly, has fallen 68% since March 3 to $735 million today.

Cronje has been one of the most influential figures in DeFi since its emergence in the cryptocurrency space. So profound was his contribution to the industry that market analyst The DeFi Edge on Twitter regretted his departure, tweeting on March 6 that “Andre Cronje is the godfather of DeFi.”

Signs that Cronje planned to leave the field became apparent last week when all of Cronje's tweets were deleted from his account, followed by a complete deactivation.

Wonderland (TIME) and Abracadabra.money (MIM) core member Dani Sesta has signed on to market Cronje's latest project, Solidly.

However, since Sesta had to leave Solidly to deal with the crisis in Wonderland, Cronje had to become the face of the project. The stress of this burden can be too much.