DeFi Research News March 2022

Industry News - Andre leaves DeFi again

Andre Cronje has been a very influential figure in the DeFi industry ever since the launch of Yearn Finance, a decentralized yield aggregator protocol back in 2020. The project’s native governance token, YFI, went from $0 to just over $40,000 during DeFi summer back in 2020, drawing attention from the entire ecosystem.

However, much to the dismay of the ecosystem, Andre has repeatedly thrown in the towel, and no longer wishes to continue developing in the DeFi space. This isn’t the first time that Andre stepped away from DeFi - in March 2020, he first mentioned that he wanted to get away because of the community, citing toxic community behavior. Then Andre wanted to take a break again in August 2020, expressing that he was “so sick and tired of this space”. 

While those incidents could be looked back upon as self-described “rage quits”, this incident feels different and has been a long time coming. Fellow developer Anton Nell, and senior Architect at the Fantom Association, expressed in a tweet that, “Andre and I have decided that we are closing the chapter of contributing to the defi/crypto space” and that, “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.”

The token price of several Andre related projects including yearn.finance, Keeper Network, and Fantom (a layer 1 smart contract platform upon which Andre has built several services like the Solidly exchange) plummeted in the hours following the announcement. The prices of some of these tokens, like YFI, recovered shortly after the panic once Banteg, a YFI core developer, reminded everyone that Andre himself hasn’t worked on the YFI protocol in over a year and that the network is maintained by a team of over 50 developers.

Thus building on the interoperable and permissionless ethos of DeFi, several other developers have continued to work on the foundation built by Andre. And they will continue to do so even in his absence. 

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Major Protocol Upgrade - AAVE launches v3 on Fantom and Avalanche. More about v3

Aave, the largest money market protocol by cross-chain TVL, has launched the new v3 version of its protocol across six different networks on March 16th. This upgrade, now available on Fantom, Avalanche, and Harmony L1 networks, and the Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon Ethereum L2 networks, enables faster smart contract load times, new risk management features, cross-chain transactions among the six networks, isolated liquidity pairs, a high capital efficiency mode enabling greater borrowing power, and lower gas costs for users.  Users can also now access Aave with new wallet integrations and access points including 1inch, ParaSwap, Zerion, Debank, Zapper, and DeFisaver. 

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