Andre Cronje, the developer of yearn.finance, talks about all things DeFi and the past, present, and future of yEarn. In this episode, he discusses:
- what Yearn Finance is, and what led him to develop it and eventually open it to the public
- his history and background, leading up to the development of Yearn
- the processes and mechanisms involved in yEarn v1 and yEarn v2
- why he decided to do a “fair launch” of the YFI token, despite being in debt as a result of building Yearn
- why he felt that a Decrypt article about him in August was a “horrible hatchet job”
- why he disagrees with what he sees as the current anti-VC narrative
- his thoughts on the phenomenal rise in YFI’s price and why the price of a YFI token still doesn’t matter
- how and why he decided governance participation would be a requirement for earning tokens in the Balancer/yCurve/YFI pool
- the governance processes in Yearn and his thoughts on whether or not a Compound-style form of governance would be better
- how he might mitigate whales dominating the vote
- what he means by “I test in prod” and how people have misinterpreted his meaning
- why he briefly walked away from DeFi
- whether he agrees that YFI could be a new structure to replace existing traditional business structures
- his response to the allegations by XAR Network
- whether he would consider moving Yearn to another blockchain
- his vision for what Yearn can become
- and how much YFI he currently owns personally
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Episode links:
Andre Cronje: https://twitter.com/AndreCronjeTech
Yearn Finance: https://yearn.finance https://docs.yearn.finance
CoinDesk on Yearn: https://www.coindesk.com/what-is-yearn-finance-yfi-defi-ethereum
The Block report on yEarn Finance: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/genesis/75189/defis-yield-aggregator-dao-yearn-finance
Post introducing $YFI: https://medium.com/iearn/earning-yfi-y-curve-fi-53b5fd347f0f
Delegated vaults: https://medium.com/iearn/delegated-vaults-explained-fa81f1c3fce2
V2: https://medium.com/iearn/yearn-finance-v2-af2c6a6a3613
Delphi Digital report on yETH yVault: https://www.delphidigital.io/reports/yeth-now-do-you-understand/
yETH collateralization ratio: https://defiexplore.com/cdp/13972
Tony Sheng newsletter: https://tonysheng.substack.com/p/yfi-ponzinomics
Yearn Governance: https://medium.com/iearn/yearn-governance-forum-7b7c9d0300ac
yInsure Finance: https://medium.com/iearn/yinsure-finance-a-new-insurance-primitive-77d5d4217896
Delegated funding DAO vaults: https://medium.com/iearn/delegated-funding-dao-vaults-7ab05a63d7ba
Siege Rhino question about governance: https://twitter.com/SiegeRhino2/status/1303415750238101504?s=20
Andre’s “Building in DeFi Sucks” post: https://medium.com/@andre_54855/building-in-defi-sucks-b8fdfda0ef58?source=———17——————
Andre quits in February: https://decrypt.co/21068/founder-of-promising-defi-project-abandons-the-toxic-cryptosphere
Andre close to quitting in August: https://decrypt.co/37995/exclusive-yfi-andre-cronje-broke-quitting-defi
What Andre wishes he had known before building Ethereum dapps: https://medium.com/iearn/things-i-wish-i-knew-before-building-ethereum-defi-dapps-cd6bf0f07a16
Transcript:
Laura Shin:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I’m your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto five years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes, was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. Subscribe to Unchained on YouTube where you can watch the videos of me and my guests. Go to youtube.com/c/unchainedpodcast and subscribe today.
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Laura Shin:
Today’s guest is Andre Cronje, developer of Yearn Finance. Welcome, Andre.
Andre Cronje:
Hi, Laura. Thanks for having me, and I think I need to start off by apologizing for all the effort you had to go through to actually get me on this call, I do apologize for that. I just try to hide in my corner and develop, so I’m normally not very connected on social media, all those kinds of things, so I know it can be a pain.
Laura Shin:
That’s interesting, I didn’t even know you had gotten my earlier messages.
Andre Cronje:
When I finally read your messages on telegram, I went through, like, the Twitter stuff and the email stuff and saw you tried to get me on a bunch of different methods. I normally pack my social media stuff into a day, so I’ll ignore everything for a few days and just develop, and then, like, try and clear my backlog and then move on to the next cycle.
Laura Shin:
I see. Yeah, there was a go between. I also tried to use…I’m not going to name who that person was, but afterward, I was like does this person even have a relationship with Andre because then later that person was like, oh, he stopped responding to me after this thing I said, but anyway, we’re not going to go into that.
I also actually want to make another disclaimer before we continue, which is that for the audience members, who are watching via video, Andre preferred not to do video, and I have to make another disclaimer even for audio if you’re listening because there are lawnmowers going on outside, so if you can hear that, I can’t control it, but anyway, for people watching on video, that’s why we’re using his headshot for that side of the screen.
Andre Cronje:
Yeah. No, I promise, I am human, I just don’t appear in person at all anymore, but I’m definitely not an AI, no one has to worry about that.
Laura Shin:
Good to know you’re not GPT-3 over there. All right, so let’s start with a question that seems simple but the more I researched it, the more I was like I don’t know how simple this is, what is yEarn Finance?
Andre Cronje:
It’s a yield optimizer. So, the goal with yEearn was always to simplify and to codify knowledge, so what I mean by that is originally back in Jan/Feb when I started it, I was looking at where to earn the highest yield, and the yield was by borrowing and lending assets, so I would look at something like DAI, I would see Aave has got it at 6%, Compound has it at 4%, so I should have my funds in Aave, and I would move it around like this.
After doing this for a few days, A, the gas fees made it prohibitive even at that time, and B, it was tedious for me to do it and move it the whole time, so instead, I codified the process, which allowed it to switch between these different yield providers, at that time, dYdX, Fulcrum, Aave, Compound, and the next iteration I realized is I can refine this by making it more granular, so the more often it moves, the higher your aggregate APY annual yield, and to get it as granular as possible, I needed more people to interact with it, so I opened it up so that more people can deposit funds and withdraw funds, and the more people deposit and withdraw, the more accurately it moves between the different lending providers and the higher aggregate yields it creates for you, and that was v1 Yearn, very simplistic, very basic, just a give it funds and forget and it’s going to move it around to maximize yield, then came in projects like Uniswap, Curve, we had LPs, this was an additional way to generate yield, so we built the Y pool in partnership with Curve Finance, which allowed you to earn trading fees on top of the yield aggregate lending that you got now, and that was sort of the v2 Yearn, and again, that was fine up until the whole liquidity mining yield farming governance token incentives, which is the current phase, and that required something a little bit more intelligent, so for that, we provided the vaults, which have more mutable strategies.
The thing is, up until the vaults, everything could happen on-chain, all of the data you needed was on-chain, all of the decision making was on-chain, all of the logic was on-chain, but now with yield farming, you needed to start to make decisions like what is the price value of COMP versus what is the price value of a Balancer token, and which one is the more profitable one to farm, and you don’t want to use price data on-chain because that can be abused to move funds around, so that required external mechanisms for people to provide input, and that was the original design philosophy behind the YFI or the YFI token, as well, which allowed people in this space that are also into yield optimization and that have been using these systems and know how to identify these strategies to have an organizational tool whereby they are incentivized and can provide strategies into these systems that allow to optimize yield, but that’s more on the operational level.
From the user perspective, the goal is always very simplistic, you provide the token, that it is, that you wish to have and Yearn does not expose itself to any impermanent loss systems, so if you provide a DAI, there is a chance you’re going to get 0% yield, but you’re never going to at least not get the DAI back you put in, so if I put in 100 DAI, I’m going to get out 100 DAI, that’s one of the core principles.
Fortunately, so far, we’ve been performing 10% up with the current yield phase, it’s closer to 100, so that’s great, but it’s simplistic in, it’s deposit and forget, so it’s supposed to act like a savings fund or an investment, whatever you want to picture it as, but it’s I put funds in, my funds are always readily available, and they are earning the best yield they can within the DeFi Ecosystem without me needing to have the time or knowledge to go hunt for these opportunities or understand these opportunities or need to go through the smart contracts and see what’s going on, I can provide it, and the system will do that for me.
With the current gas fees and things, the system has also evolved a little bit to make it a lot cheaper to deposit and to withdraw, and it also subsidizes any interactions that need to happen like selling a token for another token, and that also, in the current market, is a definite value add for the whole deposit and forget mentality, so even though there’s a lot of intricacies, the high level is really just an automated smart savings account.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, the way I’ve been describing it on the show is it reminds me of a Robo-advisor like Betterment or Wealthfront, and that is pretty fascinating because those are big wealth and tech companies, and you’re, basically, just you, but the other thing I actually wanted to dive into before we get into even more detail – thank you, actually, for that really wonderful description on yEarn – is that you also have been working in crypto for quite a while before, so can you just tell us a little bit about your background before you came to do yEarn?
Andre Cronje:
Yeah, sure. I mean, my background goes back a few decades, so you know I always feel so incredibly old when I’m in crypto because everyone is a 20-year-old that just walked out of high school and now thinks they’re going to reinvent the world, but anyway.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, I think I might even be older than you, but let’s not figure it out on the show.
Andre Cronje:
That could be a sideline conversation.
Laura Shin:
Yes.
Andre Cronje:
So, before this, before I started working on Yearn, I was a consultant/advisor/developer for a few blockchains that I liked the research they were doing. The Fanta Foundation is one. I was very excited about the asynchronous BFT consensus and how we could use that in a lot of other industries I’ve been working in, as well. FUSION with their Distributed Key Rights Management that actually allows for cross-chain key ownership, so did quite a bit of work there with them, as well.
Before that, I was just teaching myself really, and I try and teach by studying whatever is due, so I did code reviews via crypto briefing, which was basically looking at the ICOs at the time, seeing what have they built, trying to assess their competency, but it was mostly for me to learn as well because that was my training mechanism to understand how everything worked and to see, and the main reason for that is before crypto, I come from a very traditional FENTEC background, did telecommunication mesh networks, from there moved into AI big data, from there into traditional insurance, traditional banking, traditional loans heavily focused on the retail consumer side, and it was during that time that I started looking at blockchain because there were all of these fantastic claims happening in blockchain, at the time, of people that have…and this was just during that like early 2017 ISO boom where everyone had a whitepaper that was just more fantastic than the one that was released just before it, and it really captivated me because here was this entire sector that I’ve never really been exposed to where they were claiming they had solved problems that we’ve been struggling with for the last 20 years, so I quickly got very excited and very disappointed when through this code review process and reading through the stuff, I very quickly realized that it’s mostly just on paper lies, and most of these guys don’t really have what they are presenting and offering, so that was a little bit of a cold wakeup, and then, from there, I realized I need to help contribute and help build some of these solutions if at all possible, and then it was late last year where my passion for DeFi really started because that’s the first time that there was enough assets and there was enough protocols, and there was enough toolings that a lot of the traditional finance stuff I used to do are possible to do now, and in a much more autonomous, in a much more transparent, and a much lower OFF-X environment, which was really awesome for me to be able to interact with, and I mean, before that, used to be a teacher comp side, before that studied computer science, before that studied law, so it’s been a long path.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. Yeah, when I saw that you were a lawyer, I was like, oh, how did he become a coder, but I understand because I’ve had multiple stops on my journey to this point in my career. So, let’s dive a little bit further into the yEarn protocol, something that I just want to make sure all the listeners understand before we continue with our conversation is all these tokens that start with Y, so like yCRV or yDAI, or yUSDT, what does that represent when there’s a token with a Y in front of it and how do you think this type of token has been useful for users and for the protocol?
Andre Cronje:
So, any Y prefix means it’s a yield-bearing token, so the Y is just for yield, so let’s take USDC as an example. USDC, at its base, is a USDC stablecoin, and if we think of it in terms of purchasing power, it has the purchasing power of 1 dollar because it is a dollar denominated stablecoin. Something like yUSDC is a tokenized yield version, so it still has the underlying properties of the underlying token, which in this case is purchasing power of 1 dollar and being a dollar pegged stablecoin, but now you have its yield…I don’t want to say futures because the yield you get is the actual realized yield, but it’s basically – its yield futures as well that you’re putting on top of it, so it’s the current earnings and future potential earnings that are now combined into the token, so the nice thing about this multilayer tokenization system is that you can keep adding properties on top of that, so a good example is at the base layer, you have USDC and that has the properties and qualities of USDC. Now, you add Y, now you have the yield bearing, as well, which means this is an ever-incrementing object of the underlying assets. Now, you can add the insurance, the FID on top of it, so now you have FIDyUSDC. I mean, obviously, we need to fix the naming standards in terms of UX, but the nice thing is you’re always inheriting the properties of the underlying asset, so all of the Y tokens in the system are just yield bearing versions of their underlying assets, which means they will forever be increasing in value as long as there is yield opportunities, and if there isn’t yield opportunities, they will still be equivalent to their underlying assets, they can’t diminish in terms of value.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, and so I actually then just with people having that knowledge want to just walk through yEarn version 1 one more time and then version 2 one more time, as well, and just walk it through like how it works if someone were to put their money in. I think v1 is pretty easy to figure out because you explained it from your perspective, so maybe we can just review that quickly but then let’s go to v2 just one more time because these are a little bit complicated…not complicated but just if somebody’s ingesting this material for the first time it might have gone a little bit quickly for them.
Andre Cronje:
Oh, not a problem. So, everything in Yearn is just automation of something you can do yourself. So, let’s look at the USDC example, and let’s say you as a user in DeFi or someone that has interacted with Ethereum via Metamask, you have let’s say 5 thousand USDC, now you don’t just want to have that sitting in your wallet, instead you want to be trying to make money with it, so what you would do is you would go look at the current lending provider, so you would go to something like LoanScan or DeFi Prime, you’ll see what are the current percentage interest rates being offered by the different providers, and you will see Aave is at 6%, Compound is at 5%, dYdX is at 7%, so now you go, okay, dYdX is going to give me the most, so I’m going to put my funds at dYdX, but now the very volatile nature of crypto means that the borrowing and lending side also very quickly changes, so tomorrow, when you look at the DeFi Prime again you see, oh, but dYdX is now down to 2%, but Compound is up to 10%, so now you withdraw your funds from dYdX and you put it into Compound.
Now, that’s all it does. The v1 Y tokens just do that, but they do it autonomously for you, so whenever someone deposits or withdraws from the protocol, it looks at the different providers on-chain, it sees what they’re interest rates are, and if it can move to one of these others, in other words, it’s lump sum that it moves would not impact the APR to such an extent that you would be earning less, then it simply moves the funds over to the other system, and it just keeps doing this automatically as people are interacting with the protocol, which means you, as original depositor just has to deposit it once, you don’t have to monitor it and you can just let it accrue the highest interest rates for you that it can, and your money is always available, so if you want to withdraw at any given point in time, you can, and it’s really that simple. It’s just automation of things that you could do yourself if you had more time and information in terms of the DeFi Ecosystem.
Laura Shin:
And then for v2, that was the delegated vaults, which basically allows you to do that with any token, is that it or it’s that Yearn, yEarn…
Andre Cronje:
Yeah, so…
Laura Shin:
Has to create each of those?
Andre Cronje:
So, it needs a vault per token just to keep it clean. Technically, you can jump between tokens, but then you have to trade between tokens, and if you have to trade between tokens it means there’s slippage, and one of the core principles of the Yearn Ecosystem is that if you give it 100 DAI, you need to get 100 DAI back. You might get 0%, but you won’t get negative, so for that reason, we have a vault per asset, so you’ll have a LIN vault, you’ll have a DAI vault, you’ll have a USDC vault, and this is where people often get a little bit confused because they’ll see, oh, but if they’re on Curve Finance, they can earn 90% APY, but USDC, which you can deposit into Curve Finance, but the native USDC vault is only earning 20% API. I say only sarcastically because I don’t understand how we’re in an industry right now where that’s considered low, but anyway, that’s a different discussion, but that’s because we don’t convert the USDC because now if I have to provide that as LP to Curve, it means I have to convert it into the four representative tokens, and that means you’re going to have LP losses or impermanent losses, so instead, we’ll have it in Compound where it’s forming COM tokens, which might be less APY, but it doesn’t have any downside exposure, which is important, but anyway, sorry, I’m getting a little bit sidetracked.
So, the delegated vaults, the process there is you can – let’s take LINK, for example – you can take your LINK tokens to Aave, you can deposit it, and that gives you a credit line. You can then, against that credit line, borrow USDC, and then with that USDC, you can do the process we previously described, so all the delegated vaults do is they simply add that one step, so they’ll take the credit line, and they’ll see, okay, but what’s the borrowing rate for USDC versus DAI versus TUSD, and what’s the interest provided on each one, and whichever one has the biggest net difference between borrow rate versus interest rate you can gain from using of the subsequent vaults, that’s the one it borrows and then puts in.
The one reason why the delegated vaults are nice is if you do that in your own capacity, and apologies when I say you, I mean general you, I don’t mean you specifically, Laura, when you do that, then you need to check the collateral ratio of your vault, and you need to check the health factor, and everyday you need to make sure you’re not liquidated, and these things make you a little bit more risk averse, so you’ll do a much higher collateral ratio maybe 400% instead of 200% because you want to be safer, but the vaults do this for you, so now it can be a lower collateralization ratio because whenever someone interacts with the protocol, it rebalances. Even if someone’s not interacting with the protocol, it has off-chain bots. Even if those off-chain bots aren’t being used, systems like Gelato have built in monitoring for our vaults, so it does the automation you can do yourself but on a much more granular and I almost want to say safer level. I’m hesitant to use the word safer because you’re adding a lot of different compound risks and smart contract risks, and other risks on top of that, so I won’t actually say it, but in terms of monitoring your health factor or your collateralization ratio, et cetera, it does allow it to act on a much more granular level, but again, it’s just that automation that’s well automated.
Laura Shin:
And for people who believe in one particular token, they don’t have to sell that token in order to participate in these different yield farming schemes, and at that moment, incur a taxable event, they can just keep exposure to that token, so for instance, you know, you recently launched the yETH vault, and that’s why people are so excited about that, but before we discuss the yETH vault, let’s talk about the YFI token. This was the catalyst for a lot of the interest in yEarn, and one of the features of it that was so captivating to the community was the fact that it was what we would now call a fair launch because this was the first one…I mean, I don’t want to say literally the first one because I’m sure Charlie Lee would give me a call because he and I have had a long discussion about how he fair launched Litecoin, but this I think in the most recent wave of new tokens was the first token that was fair launched, and by that what we mean is that it wasn’t listed, it wasn’t sold, it could only be earned in the protocol, there were no tokens that were pre-mined and allocated to founders or VCs, so why did you end up doing what we would now call a fair launch for YFI?
Andre Cronje:
I mean, as I stated in the Medium article, I just wanted other people to interact with the protocol and do stuff I was doing. People like to glorify it, but it’s really nothing glorified, it’s I’m lazy and I didn’t want to do all of the work, and I want to sit back and just let my money sit in the vaults and earn the max amount of yield, and to do that, I needed more people that know what I do, you know, more people that understand Curve, that understand Yearn, that understand being an LP to Uniswap, and that they are incentivized to provide strategies and to provide optimizations and to keep working on the system, and for that reason, I wanted to hand over the system to them, so it’s really as simplistic as that. It’s an I needed more people to do this stuff so that I don’t have to do it the whole time.
Laura Shin:
Wow. But why not allocate some of that money to yourself because, for instance, Decrypt reported you spent 42 thousand dollars building yEarn and then double that amount on audits and hosting, and then, in addition, you had to take out a loan on your house and that you’re, or at least at the time of the Decrypt article, you were 20 thousand dollars in debt, and kind of in the typical startup model, which has been dominant for the past few decades, a founder would just take some equity for him or herself, so why not do that?
Andre Cronje:
I mean, I had the same rights as everyone else, so you know I could also farm the token, I could also use my own capital, and just for clarification purpose, that Decrypt article was a horrible hatchet job. They used so many things out of context it’s not even funny.
Laura Shin:
Well, wait, but are any of those facts wrong that I just stated?
Andre Cronje:
So, they put it in a light that made it seem like it was negative. I did spend that money on the protocol, but I recouped it in protocol fees a long time ago. I did have debt. I did not take out debt specifically to build the protocol, and the reason I have debt in my local currency is because the interest rates I pay in the local currency are significantly lower than the rates I’m making with Yearn, and when I say that, I mean, as an LP, so you know it was cherrypicked bits of information to tell the story that was really not an accurate portrayal at the time.
So, Yearn itself is a profit generating system. It’s been profitable since day one, and it’s been able to recoup any of the expenses I’ve needed, and that’s why I didn’t feel a necessity to assign any token when I was happy to play with the same rules as everyone else. I was happy to use my own funds to mine the tokens so that I could get a portion of voting power. I was happy to participate in that same ecosystem, so because if you want to do a proper exit to community, you have to be willing to exit. If there’s a founder portion aside, it doesn’t matter how small, then people expect the founder or the team to be responsible for it.
So, what I’ve seen with a lot of tokens, and I didn’t want this to happen, is I’ve seen let’s say a traditional 30% goes to the team, so now a lot of people that own the token don’t think they need to do anything, they can just sit and wait until the team does something because the team are supposed to maintain it and continue building it and improve it, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera versus if you have no team token, if you have no founder token, it’s only the people that have that token, it’s in their control, they need to decide what they make with it, they need to decide what the build with it, so it’s to avoid this mentality of, oh, don’t worry, the founder and the team will take care of it because now, no, the founder and the team won’t take care of it, like as long as the protocol is of value to work on, obviously, I’m going to keep working on it, it is my baby and I do love it, but don’t expect me to somehow magically do things for you. It’s 100% in the community’s ownership, so the community needs to get off of their asses and do something.
Laura Shin:
And when the community embraced this notion of the fair launch, was that a surprise to you, like were you trying to make some kind of statement when you did that or is it literally what you just said that you were like this is too much work for me and I really want the community to handle it, and so I’ll just give them a token and they can manage it or were you trying to make some kind of statement about VC coins, as they’re called now?
Andre Cronje:
I actually wanted to write an article…okay, so to first answer the question, no it wasn’t meant as any statement. I don’t actually understand the current sort of anti-VC narrative. I mean, from the data I have, it’s more of an anti-unlocked-tokens-for-team narrative because from everything I’ve seen, teams dump their tokens a lot more than VCs dump their tokens, so if you want an anti-narrative, it should be anti-unlocked team tokens not anti-VC, but that’s a different topic.
It was as simplistic as I needed other people engaged with the ecosystem. I had tried a bunch of different models, I tried to like work with other communities, I tried to do community grants and see if that would get people interested, just nothing worked. When I saw other people launching tokens in every second day of the week and they’d get huge communities overnight, so it was as simplistic as I knew a token was the best way to be a catalyst for more people to be engaged, for more people to take over. I was not in my wildest dreams expecting it to be as phenomenally successful as it has been. I mean, right now, there’s almost 20 employees, there’s more happening on the forum and on discord than I can keep up with, so it’s phenomenal to see, but I was expecting maybe, you know, four or five people that would come to help me out, not the 20 that we have now, which is really awesome, but no, no statement.
Laura Shin:
So, in a moment, we’re going to talk more about the YFI token, but first a quick word from the sponsors, who make this show possible.
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Laura Shin:
Back to my conversation with Andre Cronje. So, as we were discussing, YFI token just really took off, and you know it had a zero value, as you said in your original blogpost, and at the time of recording, it’s worth about 28 thousand dollars, so why do you think it took off as quickly as it has?
Andre Cronje:
If we’re talking about the financial value, I have no clue. Even the reason I built Yearn and why it’s so stablecoin focused is because I very quickly learned I do not have an aptitude for price prediction or knowing if something is going to go up or go down. I think TA is flipping a coin and hoping for the best, so I very quickly avoided all of that stuff and decided I’m going to stick to stable, sustainable farming mechanisms, so I do not have any informed opinion as to why the token has done what it has done, but the positive side of the value it’s gained and the traction it’s gained is that it’s provided access to a lot of the best minds in our industry. I mean, the caliber of people working on it now thanks to the high price is phenomenal, so as a net benefit, I’ll sound very grateful it is as high as it is, but as to why, I have no clues.
Laura Shin:
And one thing is, you know, this could be a reason, is the fact that it only had 30 thousand tokens to launch, but I think that’s a cap, right, so I saw that there were proposals to increase that cap, I mean, that alone, like the scarcity of it is probably a big reason?
Andre Cronje:
I mean, there are other tokens that have been scarcer. I mean, there’s a token called Unobtanium, which I think there’s one of, you know, so it’s probably a meme, but still, but again, it wasn’t designed with that in mind, like whenever I have a price conversation with people, I always tell them that it doesn’t matter if a YFI token is worth 1 cent or if it’s worth 100 thousand dollars, the system only cares that its value is one because one YFI is equal to one YFI as far as governance and the system protocol is concerned, so I’m tempted to say the price doesn’t matter, it doesn’t actually influence anything, it doesn’t actually change anything, and the protocol will keep working the way it is irrespective of it, so I tend to not really think about it. I did not know the price is currently 28 unless you mentioned that a little bit earlier. I actually lost…I thought it was somewhere around the 20s, so I see it’s doing its thing again.
Laura Shin:
Well yeah, yesterday, it was 22, so I don’t know why it jumped so much.
Andre Cronje:
Same, no clues, and it’s good for the community, you know, they’re happy about it, they like to rally around those kinds of things. I’m sure some of the people that have it probably do market making and these kinds of things, I don’t even know, but, like it…
Laura Shin:
There was another…
Andre Cronje:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
…explanation that sounded interesting, which was Tony Shang wrote that for your second pool it was 98% DAI and 2% YFI, and when people deposited in that pool, they could earn YFI, but since early on, it was hard to get, when they bought in, they would be buying the 2% YFI with the DAI that they put in, so they were basically…
Andre Cronje:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
Buying YFI, the yield from YFI, and then he was like, well, that would also push the token price up, and I didn’t know if you like purposely did that or if you realized that that would be an affect?
Andre Cronje:
No, it was definitely not a realization, it was actually a…I wasn’t expecting it to blow up as quickly as it did, so the capital I was using was not sufficient to get enough YFI so that I can actually be a strong participant in the ecosystem, so the second pool, I actually set up so that it would be attractive for people to sell the YFI token to because there’s a lot of DAI, so you know they’re incentivized they can add a little bit of YFI and get a lot of DAI, so the thought pattern was that it was a good mechanism to incentivize people to sell into the pool so that I could actually get more, and that horribly backfired, but while I will say that could definitely attribute towards the price for the first week, which was the distribution system, you know, it’s definitely not contributed anything after that because after the first week finished it seemingly hasn’t stopped.
Laura Shin:
And for the third pool, this was actually really interesting, so this is a balancer Y Curve, YFI pool, one of the requirements for people to receive the tokens that they earn in this pool is that they have to participate in governance and actually vote, and I found this to be a pretty ingenious way to solve one of the main issues that other systems have had, which is that often they don’t get enough votes to reach quorum. So, I wondered, how did you come up with this idea? I thought it was super smart.
Andre Cronje:
Thank you, but like nothing I design is ever from a thoughtful perspective. It was as simplistic as that point, I wanted to distribute the YFI token to people that knew how to play this game, so when I say that, I want people that knew how to use Curve, I want people that knew how to use Yearn, that knew how to use Balancer, that knew how to be an LP, and at this point, I had taken them through all of these steps, you know, because the first pool you needed to know how to use Yearn and Curve to participate, the second one, you needed to know how to use Balancer, and then in the third one, you needed to know how to use an LP, and then I wanted to teach people how to use governance because that’s why the token exists, is for governance, so it was really just a tutorial, if you will, in terms of the steps I wanted people to go through to show that this is a valid candidate to participate in the system because that’s the skillset I wanted for the decision makers.
Laura Shin:
And after everything, meaning after your fair launch and now the crazy value of the coin, I was curious to know how much YFI you own, at this moment?
Andre Cronje:
I currently have 10, which I’m very proud of. I actually only managed to farm 2, and then gas fees, et cetera, was subsidized by the treasury, and they sent me the other eight, and this was when it was, I think, around 4 thousand dollars or so, so all of that’s locked up in governance, I’m just happy to have any kind of vote, but I have 10 to my name, which I am very proud of.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, I think I listened to another show that you did where you said you only had 1-1/2, and I was like, that seems very low.
Andre Cronje:
Yeah, I managed to farm 2, and then I sold 0.4 of that to cover gas fees for deployments, and then the rest was gas subsidies that the treasury voted towards me.
Laura Shin:
All right, so let’s talk a little bit more about governance. Why don’t you describe the governance process in Yearn?
Andre Cronje:
So, originally, there was just the on-chain part, you know, that’s simplistic, you lock in your tokens, you can create a proposal, people vote on-chain on the proposal, and executor is set on the proposal, and when it reaches quorum, someone can trigger the execute, and that execute is normally a smart contract that then does some kind of function, but that’s the, let’s call it, very rigid governance, and only the on-chain governance. I mean, since then, Yearn has evolved into be a lot more than just the smart contracts, you know, there’s content happening outside, there’s the forums, there’s new strategy discussions, there’s strategists, there’s over 20 employees that are being paid out of the system, so it evolved a lot away from the very rigid on-chain component, which is really just about the smart contracts into a lot more social governance system, which originally was just like forum polls on the gov.yearn.finance, but very quickly we saw was not resistant, and people would create a bunch of accounts and register and then mess with the polls, so we ended up working with the Balancer, Snapshot off-chain solution, which we’re implementing now in a bunch of different mechanisms, but even then, you know, right now, there’s voting in terms of how should time based vote locking work or what tokens should be used in terms of voting because you’ve got YFI and Governance, you’ve got YFI and Vault, you’ve got YFI and Aave, which ones should be included, so it’s very much an evolving system currently, and at this point, I’m just a spectator, so I often just see the new proposals being voted in, and then participate in governance myself to try and add my say, but it’s really evolving on its own, at this point, and I have no idea where it’s going to end up in a month from now.
Laura Shin:
Do you think it would be better if Yearn went to a Compound style form of governance where there was code attached to each of the proposals at the time of voting rather than the system now where there’s kind of this, I guess, like momentum build for something and then it’s coded up?
Andre Cronje:
I do not think…so, the problem that I have with that system is you spend a lot of time and energy into building this code, and this code might not be voted in, so that is a lot of resource time wasted because the difficult part isn’t the discussions or the agreement on a vote, the difficult part is codifying the smart contracts and making sure it’s audited and secure and stable and is going to execute as you expect it to execute, so as someone that helps build these contracts, I would much rather know that it will be voted in, and then I’ll build it rather than I build it and then I hope it’s voted in, so I’m much more preferential to the current mechanism in Yearn than I am to the mechanism in Compound.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, I think I’m with you on that one, and I mean to say earlier that that question was one I got from…I don’t know if it’s one of my Twitter followers, it’s somebody on Twitter named SiegeRhino. All right, and I also actually wanted to ask you about something else, which is in a podcast conversation on Uncommon Core, you said that you were unhappy because whales have been dominating the vote, do you see any way to mitigate that?
Andre Cronje:
So, one of the things we’re looking at is time-weighted participation currently where your vote is only so strong as the timeslot that you’re voted in for, but even then, you know, a whale will just take a long end of the position. The thing is if you have something that has financial value, and this is why I wanted to avoid financial value originally, but if you have something that is connected with financial value then it is gameable, it’s as simplistic as that, and the game is simply your capital, so we’re fortunate right now that the whales that are participating are people like Framework Ventures and these guys, and they’re awesome, and they know how the space works, and they’re intimately familiar with DeFi, and they’re actually adding significantly more value than they are, in quotes, subtracting by being a whale, so it’s not something I really care to fix right now, it’s something that it would’ve been nice to see an even bigger distribution, but I mean, most of these guys didn’t get their tokens during the initial week distribution, they kept accumulating after the fact, so if they have that much voting say now, it’s because they put their own resources into it, so I’m a lot more grateful now than I was when I had that conversation for sure because I’ve seen the value they can add.
Laura Shin:
You’re famous for saying “I test in prod”, which means that you test in production and that the code may be unaudited or is unaudited, and yet, we’ve seen a ton of hacks and bugs and exploits in DeFi this year, so why is that your motto?
Andre Cronje:
So, the original reason for that was back in Jan. when I started this, I went the proper route, I got audits, a bunch of different audits, I published the audits, and because I published the audits, people put money into the protocol, and there were mistakes in the protocol even after the audits, and to me, that was a much bigger warning sign because I saw that people use these audits as safety nets. The second they see an audit, they don’t caution anymore, they don’t do their own research, they just throw their money in, and the original reason I updated my bio to “I test in prod” and it’s the same reason why I stopped releasing the audits, even though we do the audits, I don’t release them to the public, because I want people to have caution. So, one of the beautiful things about DeFi versus traditional finance is you’re in control of your money. When you put it into a protocol, it is your choice to put it into that protocol. It’s not a money manager where you give your money and you have no idea what the hell they’re doing with it, you at any given point of time can see where it is, but now, that privilege comes with responsibility, so whenever people interact with my systems, I wanted them to pause and to think about that so that they go and analyze. Now, I know not everyone has smart contract skills or capabilities, but at least at a high level, you should be able to take a look at these systems and see where the money is going. You should at least be able to trace the money. We have fantastic tooling for that in terms of things like Etherscan and FTX, and a bunch of other tools that you can see what it’s doing and how it’s doing it, so I’m actually…like it’s a pet peeve in terms of how it’s evolved because all of the projects that sort of followed Yearn and adopted the “I test in prod” motto, they took that to mean that I just YOLO launch stuff in prod, and there’s no consequences, and the reason I put that there is actually to make people more cautious, not less cautious, so I want people to have more responsibility in terms of what they do with these systems, and the key word that a lot of people seem to miss is test. I still test thoroughly. I’m not going to stop testing, and I’m still going to make sure that the systems are as secure and as good as they can be because it’s the testing part that’s important, but I know that’s turned into a meme, at this point, where I YOLO deploy stuff and then hope for the best, but the motto and the purpose behind it is to tell people, hey, have a little bit of caution, take a little bit of responsibility, and do a little bit of due diligence.
Laura Shin:
It sounds like you were talking about YAM when you were talking about other projects, but I won’t ask you if you were.
Andre Cronje:
No, I mean, it’s a very long list of projects that have followed, that have adopted the whatever. I mean, YAM did it, SUSHI did it, there’s so many different flavors of food that I don’t even remember did it, like everyone did it, and it ended up being almost a joke, which really annoyed me, like I’m honestly surprised more money hasn’t been lost. I think we have been so lucky that so far it’s only been what the 750 thousand from YAM, and I think the 13 million from SUSHI, and that’s it, like, I mean, both of those numbers, I think, are ridiculous, but you know given the sheer volume of money that was flowing into these protocols within 24 hours, it’s fairly small in comparison even though I still think the fact that we as a community are glossing over it is beyond insane.
Laura Shin:
And I just wanted to call out, so you said that now you are getting audits on what you release?
Andre Cronje:
I’ve always been getting audits I just don’t release them to the public because I don’t want to give people that safety net.
Laura Shin:
Oh, but…
Andre Cronje:
I…yes.
Laura Shin:
But on the Defiant podcast, which was published just a month ago, you were saying that you weren’t doing security audits because they were so expensive. You said, it was 20 thousand dollars for the cheapest, 60 thousand dollars for the most expensive, so just a month ago you weren’t?
Andre Cronje:
We’ve always been doing audits, we haven’t been…so, there’s a difference in…what they do with the full formal audits is they assign X amount of people for X amounts of weeks, and they do manpower per man week audits. Those are very, very expensive to do, and I simply can’t afford them, but you can do spot audits. So, spot audits are normally like 5 thousand dollars or so, and it’s a much faster review, but I do those whenever we do a new system release just to make sure that there’s a view on it, I just don’t want those audits to give people comfort.
Laura Shin:
And does that kind of audit account for the composability? Because there could be new attack factors that could have opened up when you’re combining operations with Maker and Aave and Curve, do you know what I mean?
Andre Cronje:
Yes.
Laura Shin:
So, is that doing that as…oh, okay.
Andre Cronje:
Oh, no, no, those…
Laura Shin:
Sorry, wait, you’re saying that…
Andre Cronje:
Those…those…
Laura Shin:
They don’t account?
Andre Cronje:
Those audits definitely, they do not cover for that. No, no, no, no, this is pure spot checks on the code. Does the code make sense? Does this in isolation work? When you add the full scope, you need the full audit and you just have to have the money available for, which is not viable right now, but now with the treasury, we can actually start setting out for that.
Laura Shin:
Talking a little bit more about the community and maybe your position in it and the views of other people, in March you quit DeFi, at least temporarily, calling the community hostile and the users entitled, but then later, you came back, and then in early August, you said you were close to quitting – this is the Decrypt article that you took issue with earlier, so you know you can feel free to correct any facts there – but at that time, why did you say the community was toxic and why did you ultimately not leave, and in general, what’s your opinion about having a position like yours in the DeFi space?
Andre Cronje:
Well, first things first, the Decrypt article, garbage, so I’ll just skip over that one. I was not planning on quitting in August. That was quotes they used from Feb. Feb/March I rage quit. I was sick of the current narrative back then, so to give that a little bit more context, back in Feb/March, everything was the developers fault, like if anything went wrong with user’s funds, it was the developers fault, and everyone was screaming at the top of their lungs that it was the developer, and that broke my back because it was just me, there was no funding, there was no support staff, there’s nothing like that, I put disclaimers on everything, I put warnings on everything, and to date, no one has lost money using my systems, but there was the slippage thing with the Zap where the user was trying to exploit the new Curve pool we had launched, which we hadn’t announced, and he was trying to use the imbalance to give himself a benefit. There’s the whole post mortem on that, there’s a lot more data back in Feb. that you can go through, if you want, and I remember waking up in the middle of the night trying to release reports, trying to make all of these people screaming at the top of their lungs happy, that they are justified, and it was such a miserable time for me because, as a developer, seemingly, everything was my fault. If there was a user problem, it was my fault, and this is a free system, no one was paying a cent to use any of these things, but users were constantly attacking me, the communities were constantly attacking me, the, back then, so-called DeFi police were alienating me in every single group, so I left because I decided, you know, I have no reason to keep trying to do a free public good service if this is how people are acting, and the only reason I even bothered to come back was because I saw that all of these so-called DeFi police people back then had alienated themselves. They had kept pushing this narrative that DEVs are evil, and all that caused was DEVs to stop working, so after a few months later, it had changed quite a bit, and people had started to accept that, look, not all of the responsibility is on the DEV, the DEV is partially responsible, and I’m more than happy to accept that, but the LP, where they decide to put their funds, also take liability, and because that narrative changed a lot, it was a lot more comfortable for me to develop again, and that is why I am enjoying development again, because there’s a lot more quid pro quo in terms of every participant’s responsibilities, which I think is a lot healthier narrative than what it was back in March.
Laura Shin:
And to go back also to discuss the security issue, you recently launched yinsure.finance, and why don’t you tell us a little bit about what that does and how it works.
Andre Cronje:
I mean, we’re just a frontend really for Nexus Mutual. They’re the reinsurer and the underwriter, so if there is a claim, as an underwriter, they’re the ones that decide if it’s going to get paid out. If funds have to get paid out, they’re the reinsurer, so it’s coming out of their pocket. Yinsure just allows it to be proxied in front, so no KYC, no AML, and you can still take insurance, and then we just added a few nice-to-haves like NFT on top so that it’s actually tradeable so that if you buy six months’ worth of cover and in three months from now, a protocol looks like it’s becoming a little bit more risky, maybe you want to sell that at a premium and create a bit of a secondary distribution market, but that’s really all it is, it’s a very straightforward solution.
Laura Shin:
And then one thing I wanted to be sure I understood was so let’s say I put 10 thousand Tether in there, is that also the amount that I’m insured for, like is it a 1:1 ratio?
Andre Cronje:
So, there’s two iterations of insurance. The second version, which I think you’re referring to, isn’t out yet. The one right now is smart contract failure insurance, so you don’t actually have to put any money at risk, you just cover a sum. So, I’ll take out insurance for 10 thousand USDT, but I don’t actually need to have 10 thousand USDT into the system. The second iteration that we’re releasing, which is the FID token, that is insured 1:1, so if I put in one USDT, I get out one FID USDT, which is insured for that value, but that’s a little bit of a different system. That one hasn’t been publicly launched yet.
Laura Shin:
Oh, okay. Yeah, I think that’s the one I read about. And I also wanted to go back to the fair launch topic and discuss the delegated funding DAO vaults, and I’m just going to very quickly describe this instead of asking you to do it because I want to ask a question about it. But basically, funders will put YFI into this fair launch vault and then they get an LP share, and then if teams want to apply for a grant, they can do so by setting up a GIT coin grant page, and then they apply via the Yearn finance forum, which is gov.yearn.finance, and then there’s a vote there, and then if they are approved, then the applicant will get a credit limit that’s set by yborrow.finance, and that’s based on credit delegation, which is basically an unsecured loan that’s based on personal trust/enforced bylaw, so one thing is when you were creating this, I wondered it basically seems to me to be like the DAO from 2016 but an updated 2020 version, were you aware that that is what you were doing, was that like inspiration or did it just end up that way?
Andre Cronje:
So, the inspiration was from the 2017 Vitalik article on the DAO ICO, which the premise there was that you have a DAO that manages it, but it’s also an ICO in terms of funding and it can set milestones that are based on payments, but yes, it’s 100% inspired by that.
Laura Shin:
Wow. Okay. All right, but you’re saying it’s from Vitalik’s article, but I can’t remember, like I don’t think you were…were you working in crypto in 2016?
Andre Cronje:
His came out late, early 2018, actually. He wrote it in 2017, so it’s not the original the DAO that was 2016, it was an iteration on top of that.
Laura Shin:
Okay, and so I recently published another podcast with Olaf Carlson-Wee of Polychain Capital, and we were talking about YFI, and he was saying that in his mind, what you’re creating is something that is a new structure that replaces traditional business structures, what do you think of that statement?
Andre Cronje:
I don’t know if I’d say replaces versus a decentralized implementation thereof, but now I’m being very specific on terminology because, you know, business structures exist because they function well, so we sought with Yearn governance as well, where originally everyone was just participants, and it was quite chaotic, and eventually, sort of leaders started popping up in their respective areas, you know, marketing had their own figure head and finance had their own figurehead, and eventually, these people were elevated to the positions where they’re sort of the delegated decision makers, and that’s very traditional business structure, but instead of where in a traditional business structure it’s very top down, this all occurred organically bottom up, so that’s why I say you’re still going to end up with the same sort of business structures if you draw it on a piece of paper, I just think the way that you arrive at who those people are and how they are empowered to do so, it’s very different because now if one of those actors are no longer functioning appropriately, you know, it’s not a CEO that’s firing them but it’s the people in the forum that are delegating their power to them that end up replacing them, so it’s this mix of business and…I mean, if you look at traditional business structures and you look at traditional democracy politic structures, I think they overlap a lot in how they accomplish this, and doing that all in a decentralized semi-anon way, I think is very, very cool, but I don’t think it replaces it, I think it’s just a different implementation thereof.
Laura Shin:
But you agree that it is kind of like a new type of business structure that we’re seeing except just completely different from what’s been around for the last couple hundred years, yes?
Andre Cronje:
I mean, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, sorry, I was just thinking, like it’s weird it being put that way, but I guess, which is pretty cool.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, I told…well, Olaf and I were saying that we think this is going to be so incredibly disruptive to pretty much every industry, but people can check back and check in with me in a few decades and see if Olaf and I were right, but anyway. So, we’re not going to be able to get to all of these, but here are some of the additional products that you have written about launching: yTrade Finance, ySwap Exchange, yLiquidate Finance, yBorrow Finance, yInsurance…well, we discussed yInsurance Finance, but in general, what’s your vision for what yEarn could become?
Andre Cronje:
I mean, yEarn’s goal is very simplistic, it’s to optimize yield for people that don’t necessarily have the time and knowledge to do it themselves, or, capital for that reason, and everything that I build around it is to facilitate that single goal. As an example, yTrade, which is the 1000x leverage stablecoin trades, that increases trading volume on Curve, which increases trading fees for LPs, which increases yield. yLiquidate keeps the system safe in terms of delegated vaults, but when it does liquidate, a percentage of that goes into the treasury, which again, increases yield. ySwap is single sided AMM, which allows you to provide that single asset and still have LP exposure without having the impermanent loss side, so that again increases yield. Everything has a singular purpose, and that is to increase yield because I want Yearn to be the one stop deposit and forget automated yield money manager.
Laura Shin:
All right, yeah, and fascinatingly, this will all happen in a decentralized manner or could. But let’s actually just now discuss the world of traditional corporate structures. Prior to working on Yearn, you were and maybe still are a technical advisor to the Fantom Foundation. In early January, one of its South African partners, XAR Network said that it was preparing…sorry, this was in July, it was preparing civil and criminal action against you because allegedly work you had done for it later launched on Fantom, not on XAR, and when they confronted you, you said, if you guys wish to take legal action go for it. Additionally, they said that you, “unlawfully and without authorization open sourced intellectual property intended for private use to the public,” and they also say that you were running a number of yEarn and iEarn domains in their private infrastructure including yearn.finance, yearn.exchange, yearn.fi, et cetera, what do you have to say about their allegations?
Andre Cronje:
Look, it’s a lot easier if I actually provide the documentation they sent and show that to people versus me saying that it’s all garbage because it’s he said, she said, which never really gets you anywhere. The long and the short is all of this only happened after Yearn’s success. All of this happened, and I have letters of them claiming if I pay them 85 thousand US dollars that they will remove these notices and hand over the domains. All of this stems out of there is no contractual agreements between me and them, so there is no legal action they can take, and the civil action they were trying to take is based on the fact that I had unlawful access to our AWS account, which was registered under my credit card that I have proof and evidence for, as well, so nothing has come of this. There have been a few news desks that have tried to write stories about this. I even got legal counsel that reached out to each and every single South African police station to try and find this case they supposedly launched against me, which Greg himself later came out and said there is no case against me, so it’s…I mean, I don’t want to badmouth the guys, but…
Laura Shin:
And Greg is from Fantom? Right.
Andre Cronje:
No, no, no from XAR not Fantom. So, I don’t want to badmouth, but like this whole experience has just been a very underhanded way for them to try and get money.
Laura Shin:
Hi folks, after recording this show, I and Unchained did not reach out to XAR or Greg Van der Spuy, who is mentioned on the show, before publication. We are now amending this episode to provide additional context. Whether or not Andre’s statements in his episode are inaccurate is up to interpretation, but the additional context can help you all decide.
During the episode, I asked Andre about a dispute he had with Fantom and XAR, which involves Greg Van der Spuy of ZAR network, and Andre said, QUOTE “there is no contractual agreements between me and them.” The additional context I would like to provide here is that Greg, Andre and two other parties had a memorandum of understanding dating back to May 2019 to establish a blockchain platform called ZAR (Z-A-R) Network. Later, a contract between an entity named Kirknewtown, of which Andre had 25%, and the Fantom Network was signed in August 2019.
Andre also said, QUOTE, “The long and the short is all of this only happened after Yearn’s success.” Andre dates Yearn’s success to May 2020 when Yearn reached a TVL of more than $10 million. Greg’s first legal letter to Andre was June 16, 2020. However, text messages show discord between Andre and Greg in April.
I also asked Andre about their allegations that he was running yearn.finance, yearn.exchange and yearn.fi, on their infrastructure. Andre said that the civil action against him was QUOTE “based on the fact that I had unlawful access to our [Amazon Web Services] account, which was registered under my credit card that I have proof and evidence for.” Greg says it is true that Andre registered those on Andre’s personal AWS and with his personal credit card. However, on the WhoIs lookup, for yearn.finance and yearn.exchange, the registrant organization, which is another word for owner, is ZAR network, spelled Z-A-R, which is the blockchain platform described in the memorandum of understanding.
Also, Greg says that Andre originally tried to register 12 domains using Greg’s personal credit card and Greg’s AWS account, but that when the payment for the domains for yearn.finance, yearn.fi and yearn.exchange was declined on Greg’s card, Andre registered those on his personal card. Andre claims that it was a shared AWS for the company. Greg says it is his account. In a text exchange, Andre informed Greg he had accidentally registered those domains on what Greg calls “our” account, and Andre responds he thought he was logged in on his account and so would reimburse Greg. Greg responds, “No need at all dude.”
Additionally, it looks like Andre had stored the logo that is now used as the Yearn logo on the XAR — X-A-R Google drive, and the ileverage.finance, iliquidate.finance and itrade.finance domains were also stored on Greg’s AWS, and those domains now show notices that they are QUOTE, “the subject of an active criminal investigation (Case number CAS 176/7/2020) of fraud, theft and crimen injuria with the South African Police Services.” The notice says this also applies to a list of other domains, including yearn.finance.
Lastly, Andre said in the show, QUOTE, “Greg himself later came out and said there is no case against me,” however Greg says there is an active criminal investigation into Andre opened in Sea Point, Cape Town. Andre says his attorneys have looked for the case, but haven’t found anything. I reached out to the South African Police in multiple ways and was not able to determine the validity of the claims of either side. However, the police did say that the notice on the websites was not placed by them since the contact address is a Gmail address, and not a South African Police Service or SAPS email.
I and the team at Unchained regret not reaching out to XAR or Fantom for comment before publishing the show. Now, back to my conversation with Andre.
Laura Shin:
The fees on the Ethereum blockchain have been incredibly high in recent weeks, although at least at the time of recording at least gas fees have come down somewhat, but somebody did tell me that the other day they lost 600 dollars in failed transactions alone, so I wondered have you ever considered or would you consider moving yEarn to another blockchain?
Andre Cronje:
I would definitely consider it. Practically, it just doesn’t make any sense right now. For yEarn to work you need USDT, you need DAI, you need LINK. On top of that, you need Compound, you need Aave, you need Uniswap with aggregators like 1inch, and Paraswap, and Matcha. On top of that, you need Metamask, Etherscan, Remix, so while I would gladly move to another chain that supported everything if not a subset of what I just mentioned, I don’t foresee that happening within the next six months or even year.
Laura Shin:
And do you have any preference for any particular Layer 2 solution?
Andre Cronje:
I mean, I definitely have my bias in terms of the projects I’ve worked with in the past, but, like, none of them have really been tested. So, everyone always likes to use this, oh, but their fees are so much cheaper or their transactions are so much faster, but you know it’s the highway analogy. It’s, if you have an Autobahn that has no cars on it, you can drive very, very fast, but if it’s filled with cars, you’re going to sit in traffic like everyone else. Now, Ethereum is the traffic, if you move all of the traffic to a different blockchain, it doesn’t mean it’s all of a sudden going to be better, it might be just as congested as Ethereum unless you’re willing to sacrifice security or some other metric, so, I mean, it’s a longwinded way to try and avoid answering the question directly because I don’t want to mention any projects because them I’m shilling some random coin, again.
Laura Shin:
And this was a question inspired by Phil Manley on Twitter, if you were to start some sort of cross chain version of yEarn, what blockchain or blockchains would you add?
Andre Cronje:
I actually don’t think I’m qualified enough at this point to answer this question. I’ve been so bogged down in Eth since Jan. that I’m actually not that up to date with the Layer 1 landscape, at this point in time. I mean, I’ve heard a lot about something like DOT but I haven’t actually looked at Polkadot. I’ve done a cursory look at something like Solana, I’ve stayed up to date with Fusion and Fantom, but I’d actually have to revisit the landscape to make that decision because it’s going to be a lot more around the tooling that’s available more so than the actual capacity of the blockchain.
Laura Shin:
That makes sense. That’s interesting. All right, well, there’s about five million other things I could’ve asked you because there’s a ton of activity going on in Yearn, but maybe we’ll just have to have you back some other time. But in the meantime, where can people learn more about you and yEarn?
Andre Cronje:
The best place for yEarn is to head over to docs.yearn.finance. The guys currently working on it have done a phenomenal job. If it’s more about like the grassroots/day-to-day stuff, definitely the governance forum, gov.yearn.finance, and to learn more about me, don’t, like I’m just a wheel in the cog, don’t waste your time and energy on it, rather spend it on Yearn because that’s the thing that’s going to be there if I die tomorrow, so spend your time on permanent stuff not impermanent stuff.
Laura Shin:
All right, great. Well, thank you so much for coming on Unchained, this has been so fun.
Andre Cronje:
Thank you very much, Laura.
Laura Shin:
Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Andre and yEarn, check out the show notes for this episode. Don’t forget you can now watch video recordings of the shows on the Unchained YouTube channel, go to youtube.com/c/unchained podcast and subscribe today. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Anthony Yoon, Daniel Nuss, and the team at CLK Transcription. Thanks for listening.
