[HN Gopher] Cronje Quits Crypto, Abandons Fantom, Yearn Finance
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Cronje Quits Crypto, Abandons Fantom, Yearn Finance
Author : nscalf
Score : 82 points
Date : 2022-03-07 18:03 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thismorningonchain.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thismorningonchain.com)
| uncomputation wrote:
| 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.
| madrox wrote:
| 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.
| Traster wrote:
| 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.
| uncomputation wrote:
| 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."
| cslarson wrote:
| 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.
| yeahsure8 wrote:
| dogman144 wrote:
| 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.
| prohobo wrote:
| 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?
| nscalf wrote:
| 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.
| hi5eyes wrote:
| and dumped on the top 20 protocols he promised would get
| airdrops, pumped for exit liquidity and so is now worth 9 figures
| rchaud wrote:
| The antiwork wolf of Wall St
| arcadeparade wrote:
| he made $2 billion in 2 years and fucked over a huge amount of
| people
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Anyone report him to the SEC and DOJ Crypto enforcement
| division yet?
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| This is perfectly legal
| rchaud wrote:
| 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"
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "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
| colinmhayes wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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-...
| gjvc wrote:
| do you know of a link to the timeline of events and mis-steps
| etc?
| arzt wrote:
| Source?
| carnitine wrote:
| Good for him.
| thawaya3113 wrote:
| I can't blame him at all.
|
| Code is law and all that.
| [deleted]
| morganslaw wrote:
| 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?
| cslarson wrote:
| 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.
| seibelj wrote:
| 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
| dogman144 wrote:
| 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...
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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?
| akyu wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| > 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.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| There's gotta be someone at the end of this chain getting the
| shrift
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| crypto must certainly be the worlds biggest wealth generating
| machine if people are borrowing at 30%. that or its a pyramid
| scheme
| ayngg wrote:
| The rates aren't that high, and for people that trade
| volatility, yes it can be insanely profitable.
| tootie wrote:
| It also seems to be an economic niche that is 100% rents
| and 0% utility.
| koolba wrote:
| It's both. Pyramid schemes generate wealth for a subset of
| the pyramid.
| cslarson wrote:
| 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.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| 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.
| tylersmith wrote:
| 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.
| ludamad wrote:
| 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)
| paulpauper wrote:
| The price is still in the $20k range, which I guess shows the
| power or benefits of decentralized governance.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 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.
| dogman144 wrote:
| It was about 3 years in with a handoff to Gavin Andresen, and
| decentralization around defi/web3 projects != btc's
| decentralization.
| mhluongo wrote:
| 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.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| 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?
| embeng4096 wrote:
| 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/1500405475296
| 2969...
| cwkoss wrote:
| I have never heard of any of these entities. Were they big?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| 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.
| brimble wrote:
| 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.
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| 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?
| duped wrote:
| The second is much easier to read as a layperson because it
| contains punctuation, articles, and prepositions.
| brimble wrote:
| Your example is much easier to parse, and I know _far less_
| about that than about the industry in the HN title.
| ushakov wrote:
| yearn finance had as much as $5B locked in assets
|
| source: https://www.defipulse.com/projects/yearn.finance
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Solidity is the dominant language to write smart contracts. See
| https://github.com/ethereum/solidity
| tekstar wrote:
| The entity that is referred to in the article as shutting
| down is 'Solidly'
| bseidensticker wrote:
| Solidity was not mentioned in the article or this comment
| thread (aside from your comment).
| dmitriid wrote:
| 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
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