Yearn Finance founder Andre Cronje suggests he did not mishandle the Eminence (EMN) project’s economic exploit, which he insists functions well. He accuses certain social actors of creating a story around EMN that caused rational actors to jump onto the token. Cronje’s comments follow reports that a group of defi community members planning to sue the smart contract builder whom they say is culpable in the $15 million EMN token hack.
In a post on Medium, Cronje who has vowed not to use his Twitter account, talks of his role and the journey which he says has had both failures and successes. In what may seem like an attempt to absolve himself, Cronje writes:
“I’ve been wrong more times than I’ve been right, I’ve failed more times than I’ve succeeded. I’ve had conceptual ideas that failed in practice. I do not build to make a number go up.” Cronje appears to lament the involvement of speculators and how this distracts from the main objectives of building useful tools.
The Yearn founder then claims that Defi tokens are not the same as stocks. He says although “people treat them like stocks, in Defi, tokens are a coordination mechanism.” He says possession of tokens should signal that one “wants to become a contributor and not a bystander.”
Speculators Ruining Defi
Meanwhile, Cronje also clarifies that the apparent distinction between a team (devs) and the community, which he says is the source of friction, should not exist.
“There is no separation, they are one and the same,” elaborates Cronje who now says he did not create Yearn.
The Yearn founder then briefly zeroes in on the botched EMN token whose code he says “functioned as designed.”
Defending himself further, Cronje explains:
“The contracts went through my normal testing cycles and were at stage 5, on that day alone I had deployed ~2 different versions. LBI is working as intended, it still is, and I am still using it to create a real-world example of how such templates function.”
Instead, the Yearn founder blames people that confuse price with functionality. He points to LBI as the perfect example where “people bought it off Uniswap, inflating the price, something that a rational actor that understood how the system worked should never have done.”
