25 projects will be stopped, and the king of DeFi will “run away”​?

digiXnode
8 min readMar 14, 2022

This is the 1590th original issue of the vernacular blockchain

Author | Five Fireball Leaders

Produced | Vernacular Blockchain (ID: helloBTC)

On March 6, Anton Nell, senior solution architect of Fantom, posted on his personal social media platform that YFI founders Andre Cronje (AC) and Anton Nell decided not to continue to contribute to the DeFi and Crypto fields, and at the same time, The 25 protocols developed by the two will cease operations on April 3.

Recently, the community has been brushing “Defi can’t live without AC (Andre Cronje)”. Who is AC and why does it “run”? And other issues. As early as the early days of AC’s fame, the vernacular blockchain published an article “4 projects in 4 months, is AC the “King of DeFi” or a “scumbag” with many people? “Introduce him. He is the founder of YFI. He became popular because of the YFI (Uncle) he launched and is known as the “King of DeFi”. He was also called “scumbag” because he launched 4 well-known projects in less than 4 months in the early days.

Because AC has released too many projects, many people didn’t realize that there were as many as 25 until AC was about to “retire”. Thank you for your contribution to the DeFi ecosystem. Let’s take this opportunity to review AC’s legendary history and his early well-known projects… (The following content is from the historical article review)

01 Yearn. finance (YFI) and AC

There is no need to say more about YFI, most people in the circle now know how popular YFI is just by looking at the endless series of uncles and aggregator imitation disks after YFI. An important indicator to measure the quality of a project is how many imitators appear after it.

Many readers learned about AC through YFI, but in fact, it was not YFI that AC first became famous, and when the popularity of Western Europe was popular, he was the Code Review columnist of the Cryptobriefing website. At that time, the old leek in the circle, Cryptobriefing’s ICO project evaluation, and the Code evaluation written by AC were must-see for every article.

To put it simply, AC had the taste of a golden finger at that time. AC said that a project with good code may not be popular, but if the code is poor, it is doomed to fail.

The famous work in my impression is the Code Review of Holochain in 2018. At that time, when the industry had not heard much about it, and few people understood it, AC concluded: “This is something entirely new, and it isn’t. ‘t a blockchain, this is a new kind of decentralized beast, but I love it” It), and then Holochain went live, and the price skyrocketed. Although the popularity of the mining machine has not been launched for a long time many bigwigs in the circle are still very optimistic about the concept and direction of Holochain.

Interestingly, AC University did not study computers, but law. Does it remind you of Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap? Mechanical engineering at university. The two most dazzling stars in the entire DeFi circle this year are not from a professional background.

AC has participated in many projects, including BitDiem, Agero, ION, etc., but only Fantom (technical consultant) and YFI, the first project created by himself, are retained by his LinkedIn. After talking about AC, let’s talk about YFI.

YFI has not performed well recently, or the entire DeFi circle is a little sluggish. And I can be regarded as the “barometer” of DeFi. As an aggregator, when Defi has “big profits”, YFI can naturally absorb more funds, and its price also rises with the tide. When the market is not good, the reverse is also true. The current liquidity mining is generally not very profitable, the price of CRV, important support of YFI, has plummeted, aggregators such as Harvest have been hacked, and DeFi composable types have begun to be threatened by Layer2. It’s a bad event.

02 Eminence. finance (EMN)

If YFI is AC’s famous work, EMN can be regarded as AC’s “hacked” famous work.

EMN was born in September 2020, when NFT suddenly became popular. At that time, the popularity of liquidity mining decreased slightly, and NFT suddenly became popular. Many people think that it will become the next outlet for “taking over DeFi”. AC also posted a concept of Games on Twitter, that is, the combination of the game + DEFI + NFT.

This concept has also brought fire to several projects focusing on Gamefi, MEME, Aavegotchi (GHST), Dego, and DeFi players who will not be unfamiliar with these names.

EMN can be simply understood as a YFI-based GHST-like project.

There is no problem with the mainnet running test itself, but when combined with AC’s reputation and the style of love to tweet, there is a problem…

AC first liked the tweet about EMN twice in a row. Then a group of investors went crazy and bought EMN after seeing Twitter. However, this is just a test contract in essence, and no audit has been done at all. Sure enough, the hacker discovered the loophole the next day, used the loophole to steal 15 million US dollars, and the EMN was directly reset to zero.

The most interesting thing is that the hacker also put 8 million dollars of the stolen 15 million into Andre’s contract address, directly dumping half of the pot to AC, and successfully attracted the public’s attention to AC, as expected. , a group of “rights activists pointed the finger at AC, believing that he was responsible for the incident, crusade against AC in various media, and even made death threats.

AC sent several Twitters to explain the situation and apologized, and returned $8 million to the lost users (almost every user recovered about 30–40% of the funds), and stated that in the future, his Twitter and Ethereum None of the workshop addresses will mention any new projects.

03 Liquidity Income (LBI)

LBI is a project dedicated to solving the pain points of DeFi liquidity mining. Through liquidity-based inflation tokens, the common impermanent losses of DeFi mining can be eliminated due to liquidity governance.

The specific implementation method will not be discussed here. Readers who want to know can search by themselves, but to understand LBI, you must first understand the basic concepts such as the first pool, the second pool, and the algorithm formula of AMM. Needless to say, to understand a DeFi project, the threshold is much higher than that of the earliest BTC, LTC, and EOS public chains.

LBI has not experienced any hacking attacks, but the result is not too different from EMN, except that this time scientists entered the market early by calling the contract address posted by AC at the end of the article, and the price of LBI was smashed. Triggered FOMO, and then sold Tokens at a high level when retail investors entered the market, and a group of retail investors was quilted.

And AC’s Medium article pointed out that LBI is only an experimental idea, used to help developers conceive a better token distribution method, which is worthless in itself, and is not the “no economic value” like YFI or MEME before. The worthlessness is really “worthless”…

Although there are articles to clarify, after all, someone was duped, the popularity of AC and YFI also continued to decline because of the LBI incident.

04 Keep3r Network (KPR)

After that, AC launched its own new project Keep3r Network (KPR). With the lessons learned from previous EMN and LBI, AC learned a lot and did not publish any information related to this project on Twitter and Medium. However, it is still hard for scientists. After he deployed the KRP test contract, speculators found the address of the project through his Github and began to charge money, which once increased the price of Token by more than 20 times.

I never thought that this is a beta version. Every time AC fixes any bugs or deploys something new, a new contract will be redeployed. Funds will be withdrawn from the old contract. Following the new contract, the Token of the old contract will be natural. back to zero…

In this way, after several versions of “The Wolf is Coming”, we seem to have finally ushered in the official Beta version of KPR.

And this Beta version of Token, within a few hours after AC tweeted, was fired by the crazy crowd by 100 times. It can be seen that even after experiencing the impact of EMN and LBI to zero, as well as the sharp drop in the price of YFI, AC is still the “big brother” in the Defi world.

So in the end, what is the Keep3r project for?

Simply put, Keep3r Network is a decentralized trigger network (on-chain service outsourcing network).

Take Uniswap V2 Oracle, the first task of the current beta version, for example, which requires users to collect the sliding average price of Uniswap trading pairs, or in other words, this Job provides a price oracle service on the Uniswap chain.

A friend who is proficient in Ethereum commented on Keep3r, saying that it is a new thing, when you become a Keeper in the network, you become a robot, script, other contracts, or just an EOA (Ethereum external account) that triggers events. This can submit signed TXs on behalf of third parties, invoke transactions at specific times, or more complex functions.

Many readers may wonder, why do you need to delegate to Keeper to automatically trigger the contract? This involves a smart contract design problem of ETH and the current mainstream public chain, that is, smart contracts cannot be executed automatically, and someone needs to call it to trigger (obtain data). For example, Chainlink’s price feed node plays this trigger. the role of the device.

At the same time, even this kind of triggering is currently not guaranteed. It is said that Dfinity has made many improvements in this regard. The code is always activated through high hardware costs to ensure triggering. However, we will have to wait for the mainnet to go online before we can see it.

Therefore, when the Keep3r Network appears, the Keeper in it can act as the trigger and become a decentralized work outsourcing network, which may take over all the chores of various platforms. This will give birth to new gameplay for the contract combination type of DeFi, so it is still worth looking forward to.

In AC’s original words, KPR allows us to build DAPPs that could not be achieved before. The KPR network currently contains three systems, 1. MetaWallet (meta wallet) 2. Unihedge. 3. Undisclosed.

The first system: Metawallet (a wallet that does not require Gas), you can sign the sending, transmission, approval, execution, and other operations on ETH, and then queue up in the KPR network, and the Keeper submits it in batches on your behalf, the user The more, the cheaper the system, you can complete these transactions almost without spending gas, the KPR network can submit as many sub-transactions in a single ETH transaction as gas allows, there are so many transactions batch feel

The second system: UniHedge, AC only introduces two components, Uniquote and Uniswap V2 Oracle. They form an oracle price feed system like the one below.

The third system: still waiting for the introduction of AC’s latest Medium article…

At present, many celebrities on Twitter are raving about KPR. Some say that KPR is like an army of outsourcing ACs to maintain your DeFi platform, which is similar to Chainlink’s importance to the DeFi ecosystem. Some say that KPR is a DeFi primitive. Optimal presentation of reduced complexity, reduced scope, simplified governance…

After AC leaves, are you still optimistic about related projects? Why? Welcome to the comment area to write your opinion.

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