TL;DR Breakdown:
- Fantom TVL collapsed over 21% on Sunday.
- FTM price crashed over 18%, resulting in over $4 million in liquidated positions.
- The incident follows news about Andre Cronje’s plan to terminate 25 DApps as he retreats from DeFi.
Popular DeFi developer Andre Cronje and his team have decided to retreat from the crypto space. The announcement on Sunday sparked confusion and panic amongst users in the Fantom ecosystem, given his core contribution to the growth of the network.
Apparently, the news was interpreted negatively, leading to the heavy loss in FTM price, including massive withdrawals of digital assets locked on the network.
TVL shrinks 21%
FTM has been struggling over the recent days, just as Bitcoin and major altcoins are bearish. However, the 35th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization further dropped about 18 percent – from $1.6908 to $1.400 – following the incident on Sunday.
Market data from Coinglass confirmed that more than $4.9 million FTM positions were liquidated over the last 24 hours.
The total value of assets locked on the Fantom network was also reduced by 21%, as seen on DeFi Llama early Monday. The majority of the TVL losses were recorded on Solidex and Solidly, which are newly-released projects associated with developer Cronje. The two platforms lost 45.2% and 44.6%, respectively, as per DeFi Llama.
Fantom TVL sits around $7.18 billion at press time, barely an increase since the drop yesterday.
Why Andre matters to Fantom
Cronje is one of the prolific developers in the decentralized finance space. He’s behind the popular Ethereum yield aggregating protocol, Yearn.Finance and several other projects, which are mostly based on the FTM blockchain. Cronje’s contributions to Fantom helped shape the network, hence the impact of the news about his departure.
Andre Cronje and his fellow software architect Anton Nell revealed on Twitter they are “closing the chapter of contributing to the DeFi/crypto space” and will terminate their involvement with over 25 decentralized applications on 3rd April.
Many assumed that Cronje was the core developer of the network. However, Fantom Foundation clarified the situation to ease the panic amongst the users, saying that the blockchain isn’t a one-person team.
