Original Title: “AC Changed”

Author | Yu Gu

Andre Cronje is the most influential developer in the DeFi ecosystem. Last year, he became famous with the Yearn Finance project. Since then, he has further consolidated his position in the industry through the launch of several new projects such as Keep3r and the integration with projects such as Sushiswap, and the composability of DeFi The concept was brought to the extreme, and he was even known as the “Lego Master”.

However, since this year, the frequency of Andre Cronje’s appearance in media reports has slowed down greatly. This may be due to his seldom launching new projects and the general price performance of YFI-based currencies, but in fact Andre Cronje is active in the DeFi field. The degree has not diminished, but now it is more focused on the repair and optimization of the existing DeFi system, such as the introduction of Curve swaps, Multichain, Year.fi and other products to improve the interoperability, composability and experience-friendliness between blockchain projects Sex.

On March 20, Andre Cronje (hereinafter referred to as AC) replaced its top tweets with the URLs and introductions of its five products, namely yearn.fi, multichain.xyz, chainlist.org, keep3r.network, and feeds. For sushiquote.finance, except yearn and keep3r, which are more well-known, few other products have rarely appeared in media reports in the past. Does this mean that AC has started to do new projects again?

YFI创始人AC:如今更多聚焦于对既有DeFi体系修补与优化

In the past six months or so, AC has launched many new projects in the form of major developers or consultants, such as Cover, Eminence, Liquidity Income, StableCredit, Deriswap, etc. Since then, it has included Sushiswap, Cream and other projects under its command, but there are also frequent problems. It was revealed that many projects such as Liquidity Income, Cream, Cover, etc. were hacked and caused huge losses, and were therefore evaluated by Shenyu as a “rough and fast” development method.

Perhaps because of the drawbacks, AC has hardly launched any new projects in the pure sense since this year. As mentioned above, multichain, chainlist, and Curve swaps are actually auxiliary products based on existing projects, and they are not involved at present. New currency. AC also announced two new projects, StableCredit and Deriswap, in the second half of last year, but they have not been officially released yet, and the project is rarely mentioned in Twitter, which also reflects that he is becoming more cautious in launching new projects.

If the actions of AC are further sorted out, it can be found that AC has spent most of its time focusing on building the Yearn ecology and establishing the cross-chain ecology. Of course, AC still reposts news about new projects on Twitter from time to time, such as Alchemix and Insentive, which have significant wealth effects, but it does not participate in the development.

Next, the chain catcher will use AC’s Yearn ecology and cross-chain ecology as the main line to analyze in detail what YC and his team are doing recently.

01Refocus on the Yearn ecology

Yearn Finance went live in early 2020 and quickly became one of the most high-profile projects in the DeFi ecosystem after the YFI token was issued in July. The project mainly provides users with automated execution, low risk, and high-yield simplified income by aggregating mainstream DeFi protocols. Strategies, for example, its automated robots can earn transaction revenue fees through the Curve protocol, and can also lend assets to Compound to earn interest.

After a series of project integrations from November to December 2020, the Year ecology is no longer just a product of Year Finance, but a huge ecology that encompasses multiple well-known DeFi projects. Although Year Finance has successively announced cooperation with dozens of projects, including Badger, Curve, etc., but in the project’s official weekly report on the ecological progress of the Year, only five of Sushiswap, Cream Finance, Pickle Finance, Akropolis, and Keep3r are included. project.

These projects will mainly develop in-depth cooperation through the sharing of development resources and mutual integration to improve development efficiency. The Cover Agreement was also one of them, but it was removed after Yearn Finance announced the cessation of cooperation between the two parties in early March.

In recent months, AC has not announced a new project integration plan, nor has it officially launched a new project in the true sense. Instead, it has refocused more than half of its energy on the internal construction of the Yearn ecology .

This may be related to the issuance of YFI tokens at the beginning of the year. In January of this year, AC wrote an article complaining that he did not get the corresponding reward as a developer. Since then, the YFI community proposed to issue 6,666 YFI tokens to incentivize the protocol developers and be approved. This may make AC and other developers have stronger motivation to focus on Ecological construction of Yearn project.

According to the chain catcher’s observation, Yearn Finance’s main actions in the past few months have focused on optimizing user experience such as the release of the V2 version of Vault, experimental lending functions, and data visualization.

In January of this year, Yearn Finance officially launched the V2 Vault. The main difference compared to the V1 version is that each Vault can execute up to 20 revenue strategies at the same time, which can bring users a higher rate of return, while the V1 version of Vault can only Perform 1 strategy at the same time.

Since Yearn Finance has successively released more than 10 Vaults such as the V2 version of DAI and YFI, a large amount of funds have begun to flow in. So far, the total asset management scale has reached 458 million US dollars. According to yearn.vision, the Yearn ecological data visualization website released by AC, plus the asset management scale of V1, Earn and other products, the current total asset management scale of Year Finance reaches 1.39 billion U.S. dollars. This data can rank 11th in the DeFi Pluse ranking. , Compared to the end of last year, a significant increase, but may be due to statistical caliber update problems, DeFi Pluse shows that the project AUM is only 260 million US dollars.

YFI创始人AC:如今更多聚焦于对既有DeFi体系修补与优化

The exploration of new features is mainly focused on yearn.fi mentioned at the beginning of the article. It is not another domain name of Yearn Finance, but an experimental website based on Yearn Finance. According to the project developer’s explanation on Twitter, yearn.fi is directly managed by AC and can be more regarded as a testing ground for some new features, while yearn.finance is managed by a larger team that will integrate some of yearn.fi New features, but not necessarily all.

According to the chain catcher’s observation on the yearn.fi website, the website mainly optimizes the UI interface of Yearn Finance and integrates the two projects of Cream Finance and Unit Finance. Its mortgage lending function has been greatly strengthened, and it is not available in yearn.finance. .

YFI创始人AC:如今更多聚焦于对既有DeFi体系修补与优化

On the Invest page, the user can directly filter the Vault type and click to participate. On the specific deposit page, the user can also see the specific revenue strategy of the Vault and the K-line chart of the rate of return; on the “Lend” page, the website integrates Cream The cross-protocol unsecured lending product Iron Bank, users can deposit collateral and lend assets on this page; on the CDP (Debt Mortgage Position) page, the website integrates the CDP function of Unit Finance, and users can use mortgage on this page The product is lent to USDP.

It can be seen that AC not only wants to build yearn as a revenue aggregator, but also tries to integrate complete lending functions to meet DeFi users with more segmented needs.

At the same time, AC is also promoting the integration of yearn by more external projects and becoming an important infrastructure of the DeFi ecosystem. For example, AC’s DeFi lending agreement Alchemix’s assets of more than 70 million US dollars are stored in Yearn Vault, and the stable currency income agreement Inverse Finance is also In the DAI part that the user deposits, deposit it in Yearn Vault.

In terms of reducing user entry barriers, Yearn Finance recently announced that it has reached a cooperation with Zapper and integrates its transaction functions, allowing users to use any of the more than 1,800 tokens to participate in Yearn vault and obtain revenue without having to exchange specific tokens. participate. Yearn officially called it “one-click farming” and rated it as the most important usability upgrade in its history.

In addition to the Year project itself, its ecological project keep3r is also AC’s key development project. AC has also been the only developer of the project for a long time. He also recently posted that keep3r played a central role in the defi ecosystem and realized that the project is in the market. There are deficiencies in marketing, so users are invited to provide suggestions and help.

Regarding the progress of keep3r, AC has developed a website sushiquote.finance that specializes in data feed on the chain. It is currently feeding prices on some trading pairs of Uniswap, Sushiswap and Fantom.

In recent months, keep3r has also been adopted by Lido, Unit Protocol, Rari Capital, Alpha Homora, Bzx and other non-ecological products, involving many scenarios such as liquidation, price feed, option execution, volatility index, etc., for example, most of the mortgage for Unit Protocol The asset price feed helps Lido automatically pledge ETH2.0 when it gets 32 ETH, and helps Baz automatically liquidate some unprofitable debt positions.

In recent days, AC has also published a new website crv.to on Twitter, pointing to a project called Curve Swaps, which shows that it was developed by Year Finance. According to the chain catcher’s observation, the project is actually based on the stable currency trading protocol Curve Finance technical architecture, sharing liquidity and underlying smart contracts, but using a new UI interface, which is more concise and flat.

YFI创始人AC:如今更多聚焦于对既有DeFi体系修补与优化

Curve Swaps interface launched by the AC team

YFI创始人AC:如今更多聚焦于对既有DeFi体系修补与优化

Curve main station interface

Previously, the UI interface of the Curve main website has been complained by users on a large scale. It is similar to the website of the 1990s, which is more complicated and retro. And under AC’s Twitter to publish Curve Swaps, Curve’s official Twitter also came to interact and said “very cool interface!”

02Cross-chain ecology

Cross-chain ecology is also the direction AC has spent a lot of energy recently, and Multichain is his main achievement. According to public information, the project is a multi-chain cross-chain platform jointly developed by the Anyswap team and AC based on the Anyswap SMPC Network, which mainly serves users’ needs for cross-chain transfer of tokens.

With the development of more and more public chain ecology, cross-chain transfer of tokens has become one of the important rigid needs of DeFi users. At present, most users can only transfer tokens across chains through exchanges as hubs. The process is relatively cumbersome. AC hopes that Multichain is a universal platform for users to transfer tokens across chains. As long as the project party integrates Multichain based on its universal token framework, users can quickly transfer tokens to any supported public chain.

Currently, Multichain has supported at least 10 blockchain networks such as Ethereum, Fantom, BSC, Fusion, Polygon, xDai, and more than 190 tokens.

At the same time, Multichain provides four cross-chain methods for projects to create cross-chain tokens. One is a floating settlement mechanism, which means that tokens are locked in one chain and the node notifies the other chain to generate tokens; the other is a destruction/minting mechanism, with only After one chain destroys the tokens, the other chain can mint the tokens;

The third is a liquidity swap mechanism, which requires an intermediate token transfer and good liquidity. For example, the USDC-anyUSDC fund pool on Fantom allows users to pass USDC (Ethereum)> anyUSDC> USDC (Fantom) The path realizes the cross-chain transfer of USDC without the need to bridge the node to host the tokens; the fourth is the packaging + minting/destroying mechanism, which is a combination of the second and third methods.

Nowadays, many cross-chain platforms are using the first method, but AC believes that this mechanism has a centralization problem. It is easy to be attacked and cause user funds to be stolen or cause unlimited issuance. The third and fourth methods can be avoided. This problem is because there is no need for a third party to escrow the tokens.

However, although Multichain provides richer functions, it is basically based on anyswap’s existing technical framework. The project itself also provides these functions. At the same time, the number of nodes, lock-up amount, and transfer records displayed by both parties are exactly the same, that is, Multichain is more similar to another UI interface of anyswap. Anyswap’s Github code base shows that AC is a contributor to files such as “chaindata”.

At the same time, the data shows that in the 7 hours as of 19:45 on March 25th, 47 cross-chain transfer transactions occurred in total, and most of them were transfers between Ethereum and BSC.

In addition to Multichain, the AC team also developed the Chainlist website to help users add and manage EVM networks. At present, when users add BSC, Xdai and other networks to the Matamask wallet, they need to manually fill in the chain ID, URL and other information. This website contains more than 100 blockchain networks that support EVM. Users only need to select the network and click Add on the website. , You can automatically add the network to the Matamask wallet, no need to write manually.

YFI创始人AC:如今更多聚焦于对既有DeFi体系修补与优化

Since AC has been serving as a consultant for Fantom, it has been promoting cross-chain integration of the public chain for its projects in recent months. According to the information disclosed on Fantom’s official website, AC projects such as Keep3rV1, Cream, Sushiswap, and Year are planning to integrate Fantom, making the public chain’s DeFi ecosystem make great progress in a short time, not only attracting investment from companies such as Alameda Research, but also The currency FTM has also risen dozens of times.

In general, AC is now more focused on repairing and optimizing the existing DeFi system, and improving the interoperability, composability, and experience-friendliness between blockchain projects. This may also have enjoyed a lot of praise from AC in the past half year. It is related to the new perception of the industry after criticism, and this is bound to further consolidate AC’s position as a legendary DeFi developer.