Andre Cronje Breaks the Silence After Going Dark in March

Andre Cronje shocked the cryptocurrency world a little over a month ago and hasn’t said a word since. This ended today when he fired an entry on Medium, giving some context to his departure.

What Happened With Andre Cronje?

Back at the beginning of March, Andre Cronje – largely known for the creation of Yearn Finance (YFI) – suddenly disappeared from the crypto scene. With no prior explanation or notice, Cronje was gone.

Breaking the announcement was Anton Nell – a senior solutions architect at the Fantom Foundation. At the time, Cronje was working closely on Fantom and its ecosystem.

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. – Wrote Nell.

Many speculated that this is not the end for Cronje’s involvement in the industry as he had shut down his Twitter account on previous occasions as well. And yet, more than a month later, we hadn’t heard anything from him. Until now.

Is Cronje Coming Back?

The short answer is – maybe. Cronje filed a Medium entry on April 18th titled The rise and fall of crypto culture. 

Without going through it in-depth, Cronje argues that the current state of ‘crypto culture has strangled crypto ethos.’ He explains that the ethos is centered around concepts such as self-sovereign rights, self custody, self-empowerment, and so forth. Whereas “crypto culture is concepts like wealth, entitlement, enrichment, and ego.”

Cronje arrives at a point where he thinks regulations are necessary “not as a mechanism to prevent, but as a mechanism to protect.” He argued that the current iteration of the industry will “become the badlands, where unknown wallets lurk in the shadows,” but we will also see “the rise of a new blockchain economy, not one driven by greed, but instead driven by trust, not trustlessness.”

At the end of the day, he said he is very excited about the “new future,” although he also made it explicitly clear that he “won’t step foot” in crypto in its current iteration.