Life can change fast and it seems that it changes even faster when you follow the crypto scene. For Anton Nell and Andre Cronje life is also going to change because both have announced to leave the crypto industry for good.

With Cronje being the inventor of the highly valuable Yearn protocol and both being involved with Fantom, YFI and FTM tanked after the breaking news. What does that mean for both projects and will they survive?

Both projects are running independently

Many investors jumped to the conclusion that with both prominent developers leaving, both Fantom and Yearn Finance will have to face a difficult time. Nothing can be further from the truth. Both projects are running independently and are open source. Meaning that aside from the people involved working constantly on the code anybody could decide to spend time and contribute.

The Fantom Foundation reacted quickly to the announcement pointing out via Twitter that there are more than 40 people involved in developing Fantom and while everybody is thankful for the contributions of Cronje and Nell, the development is dependent on the team effort and not a single person.

Fantom was not the only token that tanked in price. With Cronje being involved in several projects other tokens dropped in value, too. Among them YFI, the native token to the Yearn Finance protocol.

Cronje didn’t contribute for over a year to Yearn Finance

The Yearn protocol is one of the most valuable protocols in terms of the price of its native token. At the time of writing YFI price is still around 19.000 Euros. That being said, Andre Cronje did invent Yearn but hasn’t even contributed to the development of the project for over a year. Yearn is powered by around 50 people working on the protocol and over 140 part-time contributors.

Therefore, the panic was not the smartest reaction to the announcement. It seems that after Bitcoin took another hit in terms of price the market was unable to endure the uncertainty that resulted from the announcement.

With Cronje leaving an era comes to an end. He most definitely contributed to the fact that decentralized finance became a vibrant market and the projects he was involved with took great benefit from his work. According to Nell’s statement, both were thinking for a long time about leaving DeFi and crypto. No scandal or hard feeling involved.