Why I Stepped Away from DeFi in 2022

For those of you who might not know, back in 2022 I stepped away from DeFi; this did not coincide with some “building in DeFi sucks” post, or anything of note, I simply stopped posting or engaging in any public settings.

Andre Cronje, the founder of Yearn Finance and Fantom Foundation, has revealed that he stepped away from DeFi in 2022 due to pressure from the SEC.

Cronje, who is known for his contributions to the DeFi space, had launched Yearn Finance in Jan 2020 without raising any money, selling any tokens, or engaging in any activity that could be considered a breach of any country’s securities laws. He also did not earn any fees from the protocol and had no founder, team or any allocation, or any financial benefit of the protocol for himself.

Despite taking these measures to ensure he was staying on the right side of regulatory requirements, Cronje received his first SEC letter in 2021. The letter was a simple request for more information on YFI, including whether he had raised any funds, who the investors were, and who was receiving profits. Cronje complied with the request and provided as much information as he could.

However, the collection exercise alone took Cronje weeks of real time and effort to be able to give them the detail they requested, often having to spend hours of research to find data he did not immediately have on hand. He thought that would be the end of it.

But then came letter two, at which point it became clear that Cronje needed legal assistance as the tone was changing. The way I had done all my projects (no incorporation’s, no entities, no raises, etc) it meant two things; 1. I had no legal counsel or legal network, 2. I did not have the funds required to really engage.

Cronje started asking around in groups he knew and thankfully LexNode aka Gabriel came to the rescue and also introduced me to Stephen Palley, both of whom helped me immensely and charging me extremely reasonable costs. To this day I am infinitely grateful.

The letters kept coming, every-time pivoting to a new angle of attack, it started “investigating” me from the angle of a raise and SEC violation (which again, as a non USA citizen or resident who did not sell anything to USA citizens or residents confused me), as I spent weeks and months of my life trying collect information and answer their questions (often requesting data I simply did not have, but was required to provide), the drain on my time, energy, and resources became apparent.

At this point, Cronje was practically forced to completely stop development or R&D, and focus solely on this legal and regulatory battle. As the letters kept flowing, it changed from “investigating” the raise, and when it became apparent that was not an angle of attack it shifted to focusing on the yearn vaults themselves as “investment vehicles”, since the vaults accept third party deposits, “does work”, and then the depositors receive benefit from “the work of others”.

At this point, Cronje had to start proving he was not receiving any benefit, and that all benefits were being returned to the users, At this point, I had to start proving I was not receiving any benefit, all benefits were being returned to the users, etc. All in all this took 2 years of my life and finally culminated in a point where I was essentially given a choice.

Cronje was given the choice to either keep trying to build things for free, without receiving any benefit, and spending hours of his energy and time to release this code into the wild, while needing to constantly face these attacks and have to spend months of his life and real money to defend it—or he could choose to step away. After 2 years of needing to deal with this every month, and endless sleepless nights and stress. I chose the latter.

Cronje chose to step away, and his last few posts were all around regulatory DeFi. Most people did not actually read these articles and only saw the headline “crypto regulation”, which led them to assume that Cronje had become a fed. However, for those that did read it, they would have seen that I had defined two verticals, crypto regulation (impossible for decentralized smart contracts simply running in the wild, and trying to regulate it is only possible by “chasing the builders away” [which they had successfully done with me]), and regulated crypto (which is things like exchanges, brokers, etc, which are offchain third party).

Knowing the above, go read the article again, and I think it will give you a better understanding on why I wrote it.

Given the new direction of the SEC, I finally figured I can actually write about this, as previously I was strongly advised by those same investigators to not mention the investigation or it could escalate things.

It was a challenging, and incredibly stressful time. And I do not wish any of my fellow builders should have gone through something like that.

I look forward to the future and a new decentralized world we can build.