- Andre Cronje has distanced himself from the recent Eminence coin crash, saying that he doesn’t “build for speculators”
- Cronje blamed “misaligned incentives” for the catastrophe, which has seen him potentially facing a lawsuit
- The Yearn.finance developer also questioned how people could “engage with something they don’t understand”
Andre Cronje, the Yearn.finance developer who could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit from out of pocket Eminence token buyers, has emphatically denied any responsibility in the token crash, saying that he doesn’t “build for speculators”. The EMN token, which was mistakenly bought on Uniswap by speculators who thought it was some kind of mystery project, crashed a few hours after its accidental launch when the contract was minted and $16 million worth of tokens sold. Cronje has reaffirmed his stance on the matter, laying the blame at the feet of “misalignment of incentives…speculators”.
Cronje “Torn How to Proceed”
In a recent Medium piece, Cronje states that buyers are treating DeFi tokens like stocks rather than the “contribution mechanism” that he believes them to be. This means that the sense of project community, which he says drives projects onwards, is lost and in its place is a desperation to make a quick profit, regardless of the project or the risks.
Cronje explains his testing process, which came under scrutiny when he said this was how the token came to go live on Uniswap before the platform was ready, explaining that “test in prod” is a valuable part of this process:
Testing is an iterative process. I have discovered issues on mainnet I never encountered locally, I have failed to replicate mainnet systems locally, and I have encountered errors locally that I can’t replicate on mainnet.
Cronje says that the issue of responsibility with regard to the EMN situation is a “nuanced topic”, stating that the disclaimers he adds to his deployments “still seem to fall short” and adds that he is “torn how to proceed at this point”, clearly wanting to avoid a repeat while continuing to build effectively.
Greed is Trumping Community Building
Cronje echoes the thoughts of many when he says that, “Logically I cannot conceive why people would engage with something they don’t understand” but accepts that “this is not true for a portion of defi.” By this he is clearly referring to those who throw money at any old (or new) token in the space in the hope of a 10x or more on nothing more than a whim, seemingly without care.
Cronje comes across as conflicted in the piece, clearly wishing to help the space flourish further but also aware that there is a “conflict in the space at the moment” between developers and speculators. He correctly describes this as being “a human one, and not a technical one”, and indeed unless a mechanism is designed that prevents speculators from being able to throw their money around at the drop of a listing, greed will always win out.
