Character Focus: AC Has Changed

This article is an original piece by Chain Catcher, authored by Gu Yu.

Andre Cronje is the most influential developer in the DeFi ecosystem, rising to fame last year with the Yearn Finance project. Since then, he has further solidified his industry position by launching several new projects such as Keep3r and integrating with projects like Sushiswap, pushing the concept of composability in DeFi to its limits, earning him the title of "Lego Master."

However, since the beginning of this year, Andre Cronje's presence in media reports has significantly decreased, which may be related to his infrequent launch of new projects and the mediocre performance of YFI-related tokens. In reality, Andre Cronje's activity in the DeFi space has not diminished at all; he is now more focused on repairing and optimizing the existing DeFi systems. For example, he has launched products like Curve swaps, Multichain, and Yearn.fi, enhancing interoperability, composability, and user experience among blockchain projects. On March 20, Andre Cronje (hereafter referred to as AC) changed his pinned tweet on Twitter to include the URLs and introductions of five products under his name: yearn.fi, multichain.xyz, chainlist.org, keep3r.network, and feeds.sushiquote.finance. Aside from Yearn and Keep3r, the other products have rarely appeared in media reports, raising the question: has AC started new projects again?

In the past six months, AC has launched many new projects as a primary developer or advisor, such as Cover, Eminence, Liquidity Income, StableCredit, and Deriswap. He has also brought projects like Sushiswap and Cream under his wing. However, issues have frequently arisen, with multiple projects like Liquidity Income, Cream, and Cover suffering significant losses from hacker attacks, leading to criticism of AC's "rough and aggressive" development style.

Perhaps realizing the drawbacks, AC has hardly launched any purely new projects this year. The previously mentioned Multichain, Chainlist, and Curve swaps are actually auxiliary products based on existing projects and do not involve new tokens.

AC also announced two new projects, StableCredit and Deriswap, in the second half of last year, but they have yet to be officially released, and he rarely mentions these projects on Twitter, reflecting his increasing caution in launching new projects.

If we further analyze AC's recent actions, it becomes evident that AC has been focusing most of his energy on building the Yearn ecosystem and establishing a cross-chain ecosystem. Of course, AC still occasionally retweets news about new projects on Twitter, such as the significantly wealth-generating Alchemix and Insentive, but he has not participated in their development.

Next, Chain Catcher will analyze what AC and his team have been doing recently, focusing on AC's Yearn ecosystem and cross-chain ecosystem.

1. Refocusing on the Yearn Ecosystem

Yearn Finance launched in early 2020 and quickly became one of the most notable projects in the DeFi ecosystem after issuing the YFI token in July. The project primarily aggregates mainstream DeFi protocols to provide users with automated, low-risk, high-yield simplified yield strategies. For instance, its automated bots can earn trading fees through the Curve protocol and lend assets to Compound for interest.

After a series of project integrations in November and December 2020, the Yearn ecosystem has evolved beyond just Yearn Finance into a vast ecosystem encompassing multiple well-known DeFi projects. Although Yearn Finance has announced collaborations with dozens of projects, including Badger and Curve, the official weekly progress reports only include five projects: Sushiswap, Cream Finance, Pickle Finance, Akropolis, and Keep3r.

These projects mainly engage in deep cooperation through shared development resources and integration, enhancing development efficiency. The Cover protocol was once part of this group but was removed after Yearn Finance announced the cessation of cooperation in early March.

In recent months, AC has not announced any new project integration plans or officially launched any truly new projects; instead, he has redirected more than half of his energy back to internal development within the Yearn ecosystem.

This may be related to the increase in YFI tokens at the beginning of the year. In January, AC expressed his frustration as a developer not receiving corresponding rewards. Subsequently, the YFI community proposed an increase of 6,666 YFI tokens to incentivize protocol developers, which was approved. This may have given AC and other developers a stronger motivation to focus on the ecological development of the Yearn project.

According to Chain Catcher's observations, the main actions of Yearn Finance in recent months have centered on releasing V2 Vaults, experimenting with lending features, and optimizing user experience through data visualization.

In January, Yearn Finance officially launched the V2 Vault, which differs from the V1 version in that each Vault can execute up to 20 yield strategies simultaneously, providing users with higher returns, while the V1 Vault could only execute one strategy at a time.

As Yearn Finance subsequently released more than ten V2 Vaults, including DAI and YFI, a significant amount of capital began to flow in, bringing the total assets under management to $458 million.

According to the Yearn ecosystem data visualization website yearn.vision released by AC, combined with the asset management scale of V1, Earn, and other products, the current total assets under management for Yearn Finance have reached $1.39 billion. This figure ranks 11th in the DeFi Pulse leaderboard, showing a significant increase compared to the end of last year. However, due to potential issues with statistical criteria updates, DeFi Pulse shows the project's AUM as only $260 million.

The exploration of new features mainly focuses on the yearn.fi mentioned at the beginning of the article. It is not another domain for Yearn Finance but rather an experimental website based on Yearn Finance. According to the project's developers' explanations on Twitter, yearn.fi is directly managed by AC and can be seen more as a testing ground for new features, while yearn.finance is managed by a larger team that will integrate some of the new features from yearn.fi, but not necessarily all of them.

From Chain Catcher's observations on the yearn.fi website, the site primarily optimizes the UI of Yearn Finance and integrates the lending features of Cream Finance and Unit Finance, significantly enhancing its collateral lending capabilities, which are not available on yearn.finance.

On the Invest page, users can directly filter Vault types and click to participate. On the specific deposit page, users can also see the specific yield strategies of that Vault and the yield rate K-line chart. On the "Lend" page, the site integrates Cream's cross-protocol unsecured lending product, Iron Bank, allowing users to deposit collateral and borrow assets on that page. On the CDP (Collateralized Debt Position) page, the site integrates Unit Finance's CDP functionality, enabling users to borrow USDP using collateral.

It is evident that AC not only aims to establish yearn as a yield aggregator but also attempts to integrate a complete lending functionality to meet the more segmented needs of DeFi users.

At the same time, AC is also promoting the integration of yearn into more external projects, making it an important infrastructure in the DeFi ecosystem. For example, the DeFi lending protocol Alchemix, which AC supports, has over $70 million in assets stored in Yearn Vault, and the stablecoin yield protocol Inverse Finance is also depositing part of the DAI from users into Yearn Vault.

To lower the entry barrier for users, Yearn Finance recently announced a partnership with Zapper to integrate its trading functionality, allowing users to participate in Yearn Vault and earn yields using any of over 1,800 tokens without needing to exchange for specific tokens first. Yearn officially calls this "one-click farming" and considers it the most significant usability upgrade in its history.

In addition to the Yearn project itself, its ecological project Keep3r is also a key development focus for AC. AC has long been the sole developer of this project and recently stated that Keep3r plays a core role in the DeFi ecosystem. He also recognized that the project has marketing deficiencies and invited users to provide suggestions and assistance.

Regarding the progress of Keep3r, AC developed a dedicated website, sushiquote.finance, to display on-chain data pricing, which is currently feeding prices for some trading pairs on Uniswap, Sushiswap, and Fantom.

In recent months, Keep3r has also been adopted by external products such as Lido, Unit Protocol, Rari Capital, Alpha Homora, and Bzx, covering various scenarios such as liquidation, price feeding, options execution, and volatility indices. For instance, it feeds prices for most collateral assets for Unit Protocol, helps Lido automatically stake ETH2.0 upon receiving 32 ETH, and assists Bzx in automatically liquidating unprofitable debt positions.

Recently, AC also announced a new URL, crv.to, on Twitter, pointing to a project called Curve Swaps, which is shown to be developed by Yearn Finance. According to Chain Catcher's observations, this project is actually built on the technical architecture of the stablecoin trading protocol Curve Finance, sharing liquidity and underlying smart contracts, but it adopts a completely new UI that is more streamlined and flat.

The interface of Curve Swaps launched by AC's team

The interface of the Curve main site

Previously, the UI of the Curve main site faced widespread complaints from users, resembling a website from the 1990s, being overly complex and retro. In response to AC's tweet about Curve Swaps, the official Curve Twitter account also interacted, stating, "Very cool interface!"

2. Cross-Chain Ecosystem

The cross-chain ecosystem is another area where AC has invested considerable effort recently, with Multichain being his main achievement. According to public information, this project is a multi-chain cross-chain platform co-developed by the Anyswap team and AC based on the Anyswap SMPC Network, primarily serving users' needs for cross-chain token transfers.

As more public chain ecosystems develop, cross-chain token transfers have become one of the essential needs for DeFi users. Currently, most users can only transfer tokens across chains through exchanges, which is a relatively cumbersome process. AC aims to make Multichain a universal platform for users to transfer tokens across chains. As long as the project integrates Multichain based on its universal token framework, users can quickly transfer tokens to any supported public chain.

Currently, Multichain supports at least ten blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Fantom, BSC, Fusion, Polygon, and xDai, as well as over 190 types of tokens.

At the same time, Multichain provides four cross-chain methods for projects to create cross-chain tokens: first, a floating settlement mechanism, where tokens are locked on one chain, and nodes notify another chain to generate tokens; second, a burn/mint mechanism, where tokens can only be minted on one chain after being burned on another chain;

Third, a liquidity swap mechanism, which requires an intermediate token with good liquidity. For example, the USDC-anyUSDC pool on Fantom allows users to achieve cross-chain transfer of USDC through the path USDC (Ethereum) > anyUSDC > USDC (Fantom) without needing a bridge node to custody the tokens; fourth, a wrapping + minting/burning mechanism, which is a combination of the second and third methods.

Many cross-chain platforms currently use the first method, but AC believes this mechanism has centralization issues, making it vulnerable to attacks that could lead to user funds being stolen or infinite minting. The previous third and fourth methods can avoid these issues because they do not require third-party custody of tokens.

However, despite the rich functionality provided by Multichain, it is primarily built on the existing technical framework of Anyswap, which also offers these features. The number of nodes, locked amounts, and transaction records displayed by both parties are completely consistent, indicating that Multichain is more like another UI interface for Anyswap. Anyswap's GitHub repository shows that AC is a contributor to files such as "chaindata."

Additionally, data shows that within the seven hours leading up to March 25 at 19:45, a total of 47 cross-chain transfer transactions occurred, with most transfers happening between Ethereum and BSC.

Besides Multichain, AC's team has also developed the Chainlist website, primarily to help users add and manage EVM networks. Currently, when users add networks like BSC or xDai in their Metamask wallet, they need to manually fill in chain IDs, URLs, and other information. This website includes over 100 EVM-supported blockchain networks, allowing users to select a network and click to add it, automatically increasing that network in their Metamask wallet without manual entry.

Since AC has been serving as an advisor for Fantom, he has been promoting the cross-chain integration of his projects with this public chain in recent months. According to information disclosed on the Fantom official website, AC's projects, including Keep3rV1, Cream, Sushiswap, and Yearn, are all planning to integrate with Fantom, leading to significant progress in the DeFi ecosystem of this public chain in a short time. This not only attracted investments from companies like Alameda Research but also caused its token FTM to rise several times.

Overall, AC is now more focused on repairing and optimizing the existing DeFi systems, enhancing interoperability, composability, and user-friendliness among blockchain projects. This shift may also be related to AC's new understanding of the industry after enjoying a significant amount of praise and criticism over the past six months, which will undoubtedly further solidify AC's status as a legendary developer in DeFi.