ANDRE Cronje became a household name in the crypto space after founding Yearn Finance and Keep3rV1, helping to shape DeFi and Web3.
The project’s native token, YFI, went from $0 to over $40,000 in just a few months.
But what is the story behind Cronje and what’s his net worth?
Who is Andre Cronje?
Cronje was born in Cape Town, South Africa and graduated with an LLB from Stellenbosch University in 2003.
Cronje’s first introduction to computer science happened in the early 2000s when his then-roommate needed rides to college.
Despite Cronje working as a lawyer at the time, he ended up taking the classes himself.
In just 5 months he completed the 3-year computer science course and was asked to stay on as a lecturer.
He then moved into telecoms developing big data and high transactional infrastructure, before pivoting into mobile security and cryptography.
He then spent five years building bespoke FinTech solutions and using blockchain technology to provide cost-reducing financial products to the unbanked sector in Africa.
Cronje ventured into the crypto space in late 2017, around the end of the Bitcoin bull run.
He first started looking at white papers and doing code reviews at Crypto Briefing.
But it wasn’t until Yearn Finance (YFI) that he rose to widespread prominence.
Cronje created Yearn Finance in February 2020 as an easy-to-use gateway for those who wanted to automate their cryptocurrency investments to earn the highest yields.
Yearn is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, and is a smart contract protocol that works like an Amazon marketplace for interest-bearing crypto products.
It aggregates the offerings of other DeFi protocols such as Aave, Curve and Compound and helps investors find the highest yields on the market so they can optimize their crypto investments for the best returns by “profit switching.”
This means automatically moving funds around to make the most of the best interest rates.
The yield can come from either gas fees, trading fees, staking rewards or lending interests.
YFI, the governance token behind Yearn, was then launched in July 2020.
Users quickly flocked to Yearn after its launch, with $1.5 billion being locked into the platform by September 2020.
At its peak in November 2021, the total value locked in the network passed $6 billion.
Cronje said: “Yearn.Finance started because I had my own little stablecoin portfolio and I was trying to manage it like a savings account.
“90 per cent of DeFi is just figuring out how these protocols interact with each other.
“I wasn’t comfortable making cryptocurrency decisions, because I do not understand the cryptocurrency markets.”
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But then Cronje started receiving death threats from the DeFi community after he came under fire following a hack of the Eminence Finance protocol, another of Cronje’s DeFi project.
The success of Yearn Finance attracted Cronje’s followers to the unfinished project – which appeared to be a collectable card game that used non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
However, one user was able to hack the network and withdraw $15 million from the Eminence smart contracts.
In March 2020, Cronje publicly quit DeFi because of the “toxic culture”.
The developer would soon return to the scene, however, working on multiple projects, including Keep3r, a “decentralized keeper network” which enables Web3 projects to source external DevOps.
He also started working for Fantom – a decentralized, permissionless, open-source smart contract platform for decentralized applications (dApps), and an alternative to Ethereum.
But in March 2022, Cronje announced he would be exiting DeFi “for good”.
Fellow Fantom Foundation colleague Anton Nell confirmed this was not a “knee-jerk reaction” like his previous departure.
This sent shockwaves throughout the crypto world and a number of tokens linked with Cronje experienced a significant sell-off shortly after the announcement, with many tokens falling by 15-20 per cent.
Fantom Foundation said life would continue without Cronje but thanked him for his service and contribution to the industry.
What is Andre Cronje’s net worth?
Although Cronje’s exact net worth remains unknown, but he is rumoured to be worth more than $1billion.
