Andre Cronje, one of the greatest developers in decentralized finance (DeFi), has dismissed suggestions he was planning to make a return to the industry.
“I left crypto,” Cronje, creator of DeFi protocols Yearn Finance and Keep3r Network, stated unequivocally to BeInCrypto when asked whether he was the character behind a Twitter account under his name posting about his alleged comeback.
“It’s all scams,” retorted the 37-year-old South African coder, whose sudden departure from DeFi in early March after building several high-profile protocols broke many hearts, and crashed the prices of the projects that he led.
Fake Andre Cronje Twitter account
Rumors of Cronje’s return started circulating two weeks ago when he was supposedly spotted on the software development platform Github, working on the Fantom ecosystem’s native stablecoin fUSD, which lost parity with the U.S. dollar.
The rumor helped spark a short rally in the price of the Fantom (FTM) token, which soared about 20% to $0.42 at a time when the rest of the crypto market saw a huge sell-off thanks in part to the fall of LUNA. At the time of press, FTM was trading at $0.37, up 0.1% in 24 hours.
On Twitter, one account, @OnAndreCronje, has been particularly notorious for pretending to be Andre Cronje. The account claimed that the DeFi architect was back in crypto, but “building in private.”
The account chronicled the alleged reasons behind Cronje’s surprise exit, and how “my haters won” but “I’ve been able to recharge my batteries and get that old feeling of wanting to build things back.”
Late night on June 5, it posted a link to a suspicious page, “Bearn Finance,” which would allow users to exchange different crypto assets. The tweet was later deleted.
The alleged pirate account, with 4,500 followers, fooled some leading voices in the crypto space into becoming followers. This included Jose Maria Macedo of Delphi Labs, CNBC host Ran Neuner, CryptoFish, the pseudonymous founder of the Avalanche-based Trader Joe, among others.
Considered by some as the ‘godfather’ of decentralized finance, Andre Cronje is perhaps best known for creating Yearn Finance, whose YFI token rose from $0 to more than $40,000 within a few months.
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