The godfather of DeFi Andre Cronje slams crypto culture, calls for regulation

Cronje has shut down his Twitter account on a few occasions before this, only to reappear after a brief hiatus. Therefore, many anticipated that we would return to the DeFi space as well.

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And he did return, just not in a manner that most expected him to.

Cronje made a reputation from building DeFi protocols, including Yearn Finance and Solidly, among many others. These platforms allowed users to expose themselves to greater risk as they borrowed larger amounts with relative ease. The loans also came with higher yields, thus luring plenty of investors to the protocol. However, his outlook toward the entire crypto industry, it seems, has flipped since then.

On April 18, 2022, Cronje published a blog titled ‘The rise and fall of crypto culture’ on Medium. In the post, he was quite vocal about his concerns regarding the development of DeFi protocols. Cronje asserted that most coders in the space were not well-versed in all aspects of the industry and were developing code based on opinions derived from “Wikipedia”.

In the post (whose opening line is “Crypto is dead. Long live Crypto”) Cronje questions the understanding of protocol developers. In his opinion, developers would have to make mistakes and come full circle to understand why the current designs are the way they are.

“It’s something that happens often in coding, you find a fresh piece of code written by another organisation or developer, you quickly start finding faults, “this isn’t needed,” “this could have been done better,” “why did they do this? It’s pointless”, and then starts the “I can do this better.” So, you spend the next few days, weeks, even months re-engineering the code, then you hit your first wall, and you have to make some adjustments, then your second, then your third, and so on, and eventually your code looks exactly like their code did, and you have that “oh, right, that’s why” moment as you finally understand why it was what it was,” he explained in the post.

According to Cronje, developers today have a limited grasp of monetary policy. This is a huge issue considering that cryptocurrencies completely redefine how these policies should be framed. He also argued that the emerging crypto culture was in no way synergised with the “ethos” and nature of cryptos.

“I have long been vocal on my disdain of crypto culture, and my love for crypto ethos. Reading that might sound weird, but crypto ethos is a concept like self-sovereign rights, self-custody, self-empowerment. Crypto culture is concepts like wealth, entitlement, enrichment, and ego,” Cronje said in his post. “Crypto culture has strangled crypto ethos,” he further emphasised.

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The DeFi veteran declared in the post that he would not be re-entering the same space with the same views but with a renewed vision. He firmly believes that crypto is still evolving and has a long way to go. “We are entering a new age, the current iteration will become the badlands, where unknown wallets lurk in the shadows, we will see the rise of a new blockchain economy, not one driven by greed, but instead driven by trust, not trustlessness,” he concluded.

The next day, Cronje returned with another blog post titled ‘Crypto Regulation vs Regulated Crypto’. In the post, he elaborated how crypto regulation is “infeasible” but “regulated crypto, however, is very feasible.” He stated that the focus of all crypto firms must shift from opposing regulatory bodies to joining hands with them and educating the world about “regulated crypto.”

He clarified that the need for regulation was a protective measure and not a preventive one, a shield, not a whip. Cronje believes that the pace at which the crypto world is progressing gives it enough momentum to make his views sound unbelievable. “One day they will understand, but not today,” his words read.

Cronje is presently working on several projects with a focus on expanding global awareness with a mission to “provide, advise, and strategise" on regulated crypto access.

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