If any umamusume fans are interested in keiba! The Royal Family drama is subbed on Netflix in english 🫶
It’s renamed Passing the Reins and while the backdrop is horseracing world against a focus on family drama. The theme of rushing towards a dream is there. It’s really good!
Andre's been involved with Sonic (then Fantom) since June 2018.
At the time I was at a fund that fundraised for the project. After the previous team had messed up and plagiarised their technical paper, we were about to close it until Andre convinced us that he was already developing technology we could use. We decided to keep the project going.
It was the best decision.
Andre worked 24/7 to get the chain launched. If it wasn't for him, Fantom would've died in 2018. It was him and the team that took a project that was under $6m market cap in January 2019 to billions of dollars.
He's been the MVP for Sonic. But you treat him as if he's done nothing.
Stop engaging in conspiracies like "he's deliberately sabotaging Sonic" or "suppressing price" and others. Because it's just rubbish and the complete opposite of the truth.
You criticise him because of one issue on one graphic. Yet if you bother to read the FT docs and The Block article (which to be fair a few have) you'll see things like:
> "The FT token contract: Is initially deployed with 10 billion tokens minted on Sonic chain (ID 146)";
> ftUSD graphic using Aave + Beets as an example;
> Zero-fee trading on Sonic;
Just let the man work. Andre is by far the most creative + technically competent dev I've met in my life.
While we all know him for Yearn, $FTM, $S (Sonic), and countless other DeFi primitives, here are some lesser known facts about him.
The GodFather of DeFi: Andre Cronje
🌟Blitz coded his C.S. diploma.
After dropping law school, Cronje compressed a 3 year CS programme at South Africa’s CTI Education Group into just 5 months.
🌟Animal rescue
As a student in Stellenbosch he regularly adopted stray dogs and cats and brought them back to the dorms.
🌟Courtroom Litigator
AC entered Stellenbosch University for an LLB & fantasised about arguing cases, but quit when mock trial modules turned out to be only “2 % of the course.”
🌟Hangman
1st program was Hangman in Pascal. In 9th grade he wrote a Hangman game, his teacher couldn’t keep up, leading to “massive clashes.”
🌟No founder tokens, ever!
During the legendary YFI (and others) “fair launch” he kept 0 tokens for himself, and only two confidants knew the launch date. Hopefully this will change with Flying Tulip
🌟Elevator, really?
Refuses to ride his own elevator. While renting a Dubai villa with a private lift, AC joked he won’t use it because he “doesn’t like risk.” Then how come "Test in prod"?
🌟From DeFi to “RegFi”
After walking away in 2022, Cronje re-emerged to pitch regulated-finance bridges between TradFi and blockchains and coined the term "RegFi"
🌟Psychology & Graphic design
During his CTI lecturing, apart from IT he taught psychology, counselling and graphic design basics for future protocol engineers.
I’m not a Sonic OG, and I see a lot of new faces on the Sonic TL
☑️When I started, the more time I spent watching Andre’s interviews the more conviction I had in $S
For the newer crowd, here's why we believe in Andre:
✯ Solidly + ve(3,3): made ve locks tradable as veNFTs, sparked the Solidly Wars
His work was used by Velodrome → Aerodrome lineage
✯ Yearn vaults + strategies + zaps: standardized yield aggregation and one-click LP actions
Also many protocols copied it
✯ Backscratcher (yveCRV): pooled and perma-locked CRV to maximize Curve boosts for yearn depositors during the curve wars
✯ Keep3r network: on-chain jobs marketplace coordinating protocol upkeep like harvests and liquidations
✯ Deriswap: single capital pool concept unifying swaps, options and loans for higher efficiency
✯ yInsure: tokenized cover marketplace that wrapped Nexus Mutual capacity for easier DEFI insurance
✯ Fixed Forex: open source framework for non-USD stable FX minting and liquidity incentives
✯ FTM treasury via DeFi: starting with roughly 3 million dollars in early 2020, farmed COMP and SNX recycled profits into FTM, and by May 2021 reported about 1.5 billion dollars including FTM
@SonicLabs / FTM treasury still runs off the amounts he accumulated (and probably still does)
I am sure I missed many more