Welcome back to the Tribe! In this post we dive into the Andre Cronje Departure from the Fantom Foundation.

Nothing should be considered investment or financial advice. Enjoy the ride!

Andre Cronje Departure

Following the departure of star Defi and crypto developer Andre Cronje, the Fantom Foundation released a statement to address what they believe to be misinformation surrounding Cronje’s departure.

Cronje’s dissatisfaction and departure

A few days ago, Andre Cronje and Anton Nell’s final departure from crypto and DeFi for good made the headlines. The announcement was made in a tweet by Nell who is Cronje’s long-time collaborator. 

Andre and I have decided that we are closing the chapter of contributing to the defi/crypto space.

There are around ~25 apps and services that we are terminating on 03 April 2022.

Unlike previous “building in defi sucks” rage quits, this is not a knee-jerk reaction to the hate received from releasing a project, but a decision that has been coming for a while now.

Thank you to everyone that supported us over the past few years

This decision was reported to stem from their dissatisfaction with investors in DeFi. Cronje was known to rant in his tweets about the difficulties of building anything in DeFi. In one of his rants, warning entrepreneurs about the years of toil it takes to bring ideas into fruition in defi he said 

“this in itself can be demotivating. but now add hundreds (sometimes) thousands of people shouting on Telegram, discord, and Twitter ‘when will it be released?’ ‘why hasn’t it been released’ ‘give us an update’ and significantly more hostile messages”

Following his departure, several reports linked him with the Fantom Project which they felt was wrong and needed to be addressed.

Fantom Addressed Misinformation

Fantom Foundation released an official statement today to address reports that they felt were misinformation.

 First, the foundation said that although Cronje has officially stepped away from crypto and defi he has clarified that there was no dispute between him and the team. He  was also quoted as saying;

“Although I’ve made the decision to move away from crypto and DeFi, the Fantom team has been nothing but honorable throughout my engagement with them. I believe they are on the right technology path, and I have no doubts that they will continue to succeed.”

According to Fantom, Cronje assisted the team only in an advisory role and also provided high-level technical and treasury management advice. They debunked the idea that he and Anton were core developers with Fantom by stating: 

“Andre and Anton have never been “core developers” of Fantom. Andre helped establish the existing team of developers, but it is the team themselves that have built the Fantom technology stack. Some of the developers on the core team have been with Fantom for years, and are actively making further improvements to the technology going forward, most notably with the middleware / FVM, and snapsync, which will allow nodes to sync much faster.”

Concerning the 25 projects that were reported to be terminated, Fantom said

Andre and Anton did not “terminate” 25 projects. Any involvement (such as user interface) in these projects was to be handed over to the existing teams, many of whom had been developing and running independently. For example, both Multichain and Yearn Finance have teams that have been operating for years.

Furthermore, they clarified in their blog that Andrew did not create Fantoms technology nor has he and Anton been running the 25 projects that were reportedly terminated. Fantom denied any involvement in the creation of the 25 projects and also said that their technology development is continuing as normal and accelerating with new hires being made despite Cronje’s departure.

Other News – Ransomware Debacle

A former employee of the Canadian government has been arrested and extradited to the United States. The employee is reportedly a person of interest in a string of ransomware attack cases. U.S. Department of Justice officials also seized cryptocurrency payments from said attacks worth some $28 million.

Read more here…

Andre Cronje Departure News

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