Who Is Andre Cronje And Why Do Investors Love His Projects?

Andre Cronje isn’t like other cryptocurrency influencers. He didn’t invent a blockchain and he is not a mysterious figure that goes by a pseudonym. He also isn’t the YouTube influencer with 100,000 followers telling you which cryptocurrency to buy.

Cronje is a developer. He is the founder of two different projects that are helping shape the world of decentralized finance. Yearn.Finance (YFI) and Keep3er Network. According to his LinkedIn profile, Cronje is also a Technical Advisor for a smart contract base platform called Fantom, a role he’s been serving in for more than two and a half years.

While his resume is similar to that of many developers, and the average investor probably doesn’t research development teams as much as they research tokenomics or whitepapers, Cronje is becoming a household name in the industry because he is one of the few people in it that just created a project of his own doing without venture capital funding and without keeping a certain number of tokens to himself so that he can walk away wealthy after his projects go to the moon.

That’s why it’s time to give credit where credit is due. It’s time to look further into the two projects that Cronje is most known for and why investors are pouring their capital into his ideas.

An Overview of Andre Cronje’s Hallmark Project: Yearn.Finance

Yearn.Finance is an absolute juggernaut in the decentralized finance space. Keep3r is a relatively new project. The Keep3r Network allows external entities to complete jobs on smart contract platforms. Yes, that’s a mouthful if you don’t understand the technical aspects of blockchains and smart contracts. Don’t worry. We’ll do an overview and guide you as you continue to do your own research and make your own investment choices.

Yearn.Finance Review

The average crypto investor probably views YFI and its token as one of the priciest tokens in the crypto world and nothing more. Those investors aren’t completely wrong. It is certainly a pricey token. Just in the last two months, YFI’s price continues to rise, moving all the way from about $13,000 Canadian to $40,000 Canadian over that stretch.

This past summer is when the value really started taking off due to capital being thrown into the project by investors. But the token itself isn’t supposed to have financial value. It’s merely supposed to be a governance token that allows users to decide what should happen next with the Yearn ecosystem. Cronje clearly explains that in a blog post from July, 2020. It’s clear that with the value of just one YFI token being in the five figures and the total market capitalization of the project hovering around $1 billion Canadian, investors want both the decision-making power that comes with owning the governance token and the financial upside. But what is Yearn really?

The Yearn.Finance Ecosystem

The YFI governance token gets all the hype among investors, but the Yearn platform itself aggregates lending, yield generation and insurance all on one platform and offers it to investors through the Ethereum blockchain. There are four core products in the Yearn.Finance ecosystem: vaults, earn, zap and cover.

Vaults socialize gas costs making it cheaper to enter into favourable investing opportunities. You, the investor, get to participate in an investing pool and all you have to do is provide your share of the capital in order to earn returns. This allows you to engage in a passive investing strategy where yield generation and the rebalancing of your principal investment is done automatically.

Earn finds you lending opportunities that exist on other cryptocurrency platforms including dYdX, Aave and Compound. Deposit your funds into a lending contract and you receive the highest possible interest rates found between the three platforms without having to do any of the legwork yourself.

Yearn’s Zap product allows you to move capital in and out of a project called Curve.Finance, which allows you to invest in liquidity pools using five different stablecoins, including USDT. ‘Zap’ your way in and out of different liquidity pools using stablecoins in the most timely and cost-effective way possible.

Cover is the most straightforward of all these products. It allows you to buy insurance against your smart contract investments in case of security or smart contract related flaws. You can invest in each of these products from the Yearn.Finance homepage.

Andre Cronje’s New Venture: Keep3r Network

The Keep3r Network is Cronje’s new baby. The Keep3r token is currently worth less than $100 million with a circulating supply of 201, 021 tokens valued at $485.33 Canadian each at the time of this writing.

The Keep3r Network and its token live on the Ethereum blockchain just like YFI. Unlike YFI however, Keep3r has very little to do with decentralized finance in particular. Instead, the project focuses on a much broader concept. It revolves around the idea that certain tasks related to smart contract transactions need to be outsourced. Keepers are individuals willing to complete these jobs in exchange for Keep3r tokens. Let’s look at an example.

Collecting Proceeds from Yield Farming

Imagine for a moment that you are doing really well with yield farming and collecting profits. But each time you collect profits, you need to execute a transaction. This means that while smart contracts govern rules surrounding liquidity pools and your investment and make sure that you get the earnings you’re entitled to, you still have to click buttons to make things happen and ensure that you can lock in your profits, lend them out, compound them further or do whatever you choose to do with them.

Now imagine that you have to do this on a larger scale because you have a lot of capital invested in many different pools or you are a developer looking to serve a large number of people who want help collecting their proceeds from yield farming. Making things happen with the click of a few buttons on your own is one thing, but trying to do it hundreds or thousands of times would be tedious.

That’s where you could use Keep3r to outsource the tedious tasks associated with your needs. You’d use the Keep3r Network to define a job you need completed, and a job seeker (called a keeper) signs up to fulfil this tedious work for you. This means the work gets fulfilled at a cost you’re happy with and you don’t have to sit in front of your computer doing it all yourself.

How can you be sure the work gets done? The Keep3r tokens a participant earns for completing the job are held as a bond. This creates an incentive for keepers to only fulfil jobs they are qualified to complete. It’s for this reason that the Keep3r Network just may be a future gold mine for developers working on projects of all sizes and complexities that feel like they might need a little bit of help to manage transactions or other tasks at a high volume.

Why Investors Love Yearn.Finance

Apart from the fact the YFI token has exploded in value since it was created, Yearn.Finance is popular because the platform makes it easy to make the most of the top decentralized finance projects in cryptocurrency. It allows you to do just that without having to get too deeply involved in executing transactions involving smart contract data or having to connect a hardware wallet to a Google Chrome plug-in like MetaMask and trying to figure out how to acquire different tokens. You also don’t have to do the math and find the best interest rates every second of the day. That would be impossible anyway because interest rates in the crypto space are very volatile and always fluctuating.

Should Investors Be Pumping More Capital into Keep3r?

The price of the Keep3r token skyrocketed from around $265 in early November, 2020 to $472 in early December, 2020. That’s a huge gain. Part of this has to do with the fact the project has formed a partnership with ChainLink, a cryptocurrency that ranks in the top 10 by market capitalization thanks to its ability to relay accurate data between blockchains efficiently.

That said, whether or not you invest in it depends on your understanding of blockchain development, smart contracts and the role that outsourcing jobs has on both. Feel free to do your own research and develop that understanding.

Odds are, most crypto investors will have an easier time understanding Yearn’s value proposition and that’s why the project is much more popular. Either way, it’s obvious that anything Andre Cronje touches turns into gold in the crypto world, and perhaps now you have a detailed understanding of why that is.

How to Invest in Yearn.Finance and Keep3R Network

If you decide to invest in Yearn.Finance, you have two options. You can either visit www.yearn.finance and invest your cryptocurrency in liquidity and lending pools to earn a return, or you can benefit from the price movement of the YFI token, which also gives you the ability to vote on governance related issues (which is the real reason the token was invented in the first place).

On the other hand, if you want to hold the token in your investment portfolio, take note of the fact that both Keep3er and the YFI token are cryptocurrencies that live on the Ethereum blockchain. This means you’ll need to own Ethereum first before you can exchange it for YFI or Keep3er.

Buy those Ethereum tokens at Netcoins and you’ll be able to get your tokens at fair market value. It’s the best way to start your journey towards investing in Cronje’s projects should you choose to do so.

Yearn and Keep3r to the moon? Only time will tell.

Netcoins is Canada’s first publicly owned crypto trading platform to be fully regulated. Simply create an account with Netcoins, fund it with an e-Transfer (more funding options available) and head to the trade page to buy bitcoin. Sign up today!

If you’re looking to buy tokens in projects that Andre has worked on, Netcoins offers an opportunity to buy both Fantom (FTM) coins and Yearn (YFI) coins.