Investors suffer losses from Andre Cronje’s latest project

October 21, 2020
By Sam Grant

Excited investors rushing to get a piece 0f Andre Cronje’s latest DeFi project have once again incurred losses

It has been about three weeks since Cronje’s name made headlines when a hacker stole $15 million from an unreleased Yearn Finance project he was working on.

The project, Eminence (EMN), suffered a huge loss that was painted as an out turn of the DeFi community’s voracity for unaudited code by the sector’s critics. A sum of $8 million from the stolen funds was oddly transferred to his account as the hacker walked away with the rest.

Since then Andre kept a low profile until October 19 when he stealthily shared his third protocol called Keep3r Network to GitHub. The Yearn Finance creator was trying to avoid a repeat of the previous incident but unfortunately, things didn’t turn out that way.

Several investors dashed to trade the native token of the latest experiment – a move that most regretted after suffering losses. It is not clear why the excited investors would rush in considering there was no formal launch announcement and the project’s documentation had clearly outlined that the experiment was in the beta stage.

Keep3r Network is a decentralised marketplace designed to provide manpower-strapped crypto projects access to relevant technology and qualified labour. The project was spotted by DeFi enthusiasts and users following the creator’s GitHub & Ethereum address and features a native offering (KPR) that powers it.

A couple of traders and their bots ploughed money into the project and started trading KRP on Uniswap. Consequently, the token’s price rose from $1 to around $2,000 before plunging to less than $100 as Cronje continued testing the code.

The token had only attracted a few thousand dollars in volume which was a relief considering the last project Eminence lost $15 million. Cronje’s Yearn Finance has recently posted a worrying downward trend. Yearn Finance’s total value locked has plummeted by slightly over 50% in the last month. The total value locked in Yearn finance as of writing is $450.97 million compared to$942.59 million back on September 20. Yearn Finance stands at ninth place in a list of the largest DeFi protocols.