Three Years After Quitting DeFi, Andre Cronje Shares His Real Reason

A legendary DeFi architect has shared a blog post to explain his real motivation behind leaving the segment in 2022. Together with cofounder Anton Nell, Cronje faced savage scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Andre Cronje reveals that he quit DeFi in 2022 due to SEC pressure

Andre Cronje, founder of Yearn.Finance (YFI), Keep3r (KP3R) and one of the originators of the mechanisms of mainstream decentralized finance, was forced to quit DeFi in 2022 due to attacks from the previous team at the U.S. SEC. In 2021-2022, he was targeted by the U.S. watchdog, which was investigating the status of Yearn vaults as “investment mechanisms.”

The statement was published today, Jan. 28, 2025, on Cronje’s personal blog. As explained by the “Father of DeFi,” he was protecting his products from accusations for almost two years.

Mostly, U.S. regulators were interested in the income Cronje apparently receives from his involvement with Yearn.Finance (YFI) and Keep3r (KP3R), and the mechanism of raising funds.

He stressed that from the very beginning of the protocol’s operations, he earned zero fees from Yearn, working with no founder, team or allocation. Also, he never sold anything to U.S. residents and only visited the U.S. once:

All in all this took 2 years of my life and finally culminated in a point where I was essentially given a choice. I can keep trying to build things for free, receive no benefit, spend hours of my energy and time to release this code into the wild, while needing to constantly face these attacks and have to spend months of my life and real money to defend it. Or I need to step away. After 2 years of needing to deal with this every month, and endless sleepless nights and stress. I chose the latter.

Before quitting, Cronje released a series of posts on regulation in the DeFi segment. He was also forced by investigators to keep the information about SEC allegations secret.

Cronje’s new blockchain, Sonic (S), surpasses $350 million in TVL

As covered by U.Today previously, Andre Cronje and Anton Nell called it quits in March 2022. Their decision to leave caused a collapse in the DeFi token segment.

In 2023, he returned with the idea of rebranding Fantom (FTM) blockchain into Sonic (S). Right now, it is one of the fastest-growing layer-1 networks.

Since the rebranding announcements, its aggregated TVL has jumped by 66%.