Andre Cronje

Bio

• Calls himself a Cypherpunk.
• From this interview by Paradigm (2-11-2020):

"Did my LLB, took a year off, friend needed transport to CompSci lectures, so I gave him a lift to classes and joined some of his classes, figured I’m doing the classes, might as well write the exams, finish CompSci, ended up becoming a lecturer, from there moved to Vodacom, building telecom systems (GGSN, ISN), built mesh networks in Africa, went into big data, neural nets, moved onto fintech, and from there just naturally progressed into blockchain, originally as a researcher, and then finally as an engineer.

2016, 2017 blockchain research was making a lot of big promises, solving problems we’ve had in mesh networks, big data, and ML for years, so it seemed very enticing. After getting involved in the space, I realized that it was mostly marketing hype and lies, but at the core, decentralized technology is still powerful, so has been sticking around ever since."

Occupations

• Announced that he will stop contributing to the DeFi space and that around 25 apps and services will be terminated as of 3-3-2022:

"Most notibly http://yearn.fi http://keep3r.network http://multichain.xyz http://chainlist.org (lots of people replacing it) http://solidly.exchange http://bribe.crv.finance"

Update (4-11-2022): came back to Fantom as Vice President of Memes at the Fantom Foundation.

• Used to be (15-9-2020) a lawyer.
• COVER; advisor and grant giver (19-9-2020).
• iEarn. He stopped working on it (3-3-2020), muted the Telegram channel but left the protocol running. "The lead developer, Andre, was brutally criticised when the system was exploited despite the fact that Andre has intended for the product to be “only for him”."
• Then started yEarn which immediately had huge traction and yields due to the yield farming hype (21-7-2020). Andre hasn’t left (12-10-2020) and is still developing, but he is no longer using Twitter or social media. Left after he handed over the multisig towards Banteg and others. Felt like it was a personal attack when they asked him to do so.
• From his LinkdIn:

"iearn.finance ~ Yield optimization for stable coins
curve.finance ~ Efficient stable coin Automated Market Maker
itrade.finance ~ 1000x on-chain leverage for Automated Market Makers
arc2.fi ~ Stealth"

• Fantom; technical advisor, since 7-2018 and was on their technology council from 10-2018 until 2-2019. From an AMA (12-5-2019): "aBFT and zkVM are my babies. Not abandoning them any time soon. Just decreased my involvement slightly as I had quite a bit of crypto fatigue"
• FUSION Foundation; technical consultant and head of technology and innovation.
• Kosmos Capital; technical advisor
• Worked on the Wanchain 'front end' for a year (4-2018-3-2019)
• Keep3r Network; creator
• M&A (Molly and Andre); co-creator, from The Defiant (11-11-2020):

"Molly and Andre are teaming up to fund developers. “$3M will be allocated in the M&A by Hegic Development Fund.” stated a tweet from Molly.

The fund plans to contribute $50K – $200K per project alongside code reviews. It also features a big disclaimer that “Andre Cronje isn’t involved in any financial operations/transactions conducted by the @mollyandandre fund and doesn’t have money in it.”"

• Deriswap; creator
• Fixed Forex; creator. From Week in Ethereum (3-7-2021): "stable coin framework, no token, unaudited, unverified, experimental contract"
• Uniswap; from Yield Farmer (25-8-2021):

"Andre Cronje unveils a Synthetix-style staking rewards system for Uniswap V3 liquidity provider positions (which are represented as NFTs)."

• Artion; deployer (24-9-2021)
• Rarity; creator, a Loot copy on Fantom.
• Solidly; co-founder with Dani, however, after the 0xSifu drama, Andre distanced himself from Sestagalli, stating that his sole focus is to develop Solidly (28-1-2022).

Investments

• From Bitcoin.com (3-6-2024):

"Reportedly controls $3.54 million in onchain funds. Most of Cronje’s assets ($3.33M) are stored in the stablecoin derivative SDAI."

• Says he holds 10 YFI tokens (15-9-2020), managed to farm 2 tokens himself, sold 0.4 for gas fees for deployments, all of the rest of it is locked in governance.
• "Is an equity-holder in Crypto Briefing" (24-11-2020).
• InstaDapp; part of a $10M funding round (12-6-2021).
• DeFi Safety; led the 1$M Seed Round (6-8-2021)
• Quite possibly the owner of wallet 0x431. From Rekt (8-7-2021): "The response from Curve takes on much more meaning when you consider who controls the 0x431 wallet. Nansen lists 0x431 as being the first wallet to farm YFI. As well as holding a large amount of K3PR, this wallet is also now voting to increase the gauge weight of the Fantom pool, so perhaps you can draw your own conclusions."