Yearn.Finance Creator Quits DeFi After Eminence Debacle

Re Cronje, the prolific coder and creator of Yearn, said he's quit the project - and decentralized finance altogether - out of frustration with its realities.

Cronje told CoinDesk of his decision over Telegram on Oct. 1, but then asked us not to report it.

Word has begun to trickle out about Cronje's move and the community has begun to sense his absence.

As Cronje explained, thanks to the fee built within Yearn, which replenishes the token treasury, the decentralized autonomous organization has funding now to support a staff that can carry on his work.

Cronje told CoinDesk he deployed all the code that runs DeFi's favorite portal, Yearn.

He's become somewhat legendary in crypto, creating Yearn's governance token, YFI, which has been valued as high as $43,000 and is currently worth nearly 2 BTC.In early September, the official Yearn.

Cronje has gone silent on social media, and the Yearn community has taken notice.

A Yearn user who goes by the handle Niffler started a thread called "Love Letters for Andre" in the Yearn governance channel.

EMN is the token for Eminence, the project Cronje had undertaken that went awry; "Degens" is crypto slang for "Degenerates.").Among the 47 posts on that page, another user, whenmoon, wrote, tellingly, "I saw your Eminence tweet that morning and thought to myself I don't know what it is but I want to be involved. the excitement and willingness to rush in is a testament to how much people believe in you and your ability to create cool things."

Cronje told CoinDesk on Oct. 1 that he had informed the staff he was leaving some time ago, but he was clearly frustrated by something that had happened in the previous 24 hours.