How FUD affected Fantom, Yearn, and Solidly after Cronje and Nell’s exit

A tidal wave of panic washed over the DeFi community when Andre Cronje, technical advisor at the Fantom Foundation, and Anton Nell, senior solutions architect at the Fantom Foundation, announced via a tweet that they were leaving crypto and DeFi.

Nell also stated that around 25 apps and services would be deleted in April 2022, leading to FUD as many investors decided to panic sell and the candles turned blood red.

Now, a few hours after the drama that went down, how are the affected projects looking?

Fleeing the Fantom?

At press time, Fantom’s FTM was trading at $1.41, having fallen by 12.94% in the past 24 hours. However, the coin was starting on an upward trajectory – thought still deep in red territory.

That said, data on Santiment revealed that as the price plunged, development activity also took a dip. Up to shortly before Cronje and Nell announced their departure, development activity had been moving slowly upwards. It remains to be seen whether a price recovery for FTM would also trigger a rise in dev activity once more.

Source: Santiment

Coming to FTM supply on exchanges, a nearly vertical drop shows that tens of millions of FTM coins left exchanges, coinciding with the asset’s fall in price. This suggests that rather than panic selling, some investors might be using the opportunity to buy the dip.

Source: Santiment

Yearn for stability

There’s still a great deal of emotional baggage to unpack, however. Some other groups affected by Cronje and Nell’s exit included the Yearn Finance and Solidly communities. Many investors took issue with the way in which Nell announced the shocking news. Users also felt they fueled confusion about the apps scheduled to be terminated.

To that end, project representatives have been telling users that the affected DeFi projects can live on beyond Cronje and Nell. For example, analyst and venture partner Adam Cochran made it clear that he still believed in Yearn.

3/9

Andre ran the https://t.co/VJLufCewJ8 portal which was the old interface, and that is what is closing down (although hopefully he’d be open to contributing that to Yearn)

Yearn is still my top 22 pick: https://t.co/qxUP5K06Xh

— Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) (@adamscochran) March 6, 2022

Struggling to DeFi the odds

Even with users’ faith, projects linked to Cronje and Nell are likely to face an uphill battle. Data from DeFillama revealed that Fantom had $7.14 billion in total value locked [TVL] but lost 21.15% of this in the last 24 hours. Furthermore, Solidly and Solidex also recorded losses of over 40% each in just 24 hours.

Source: defillama.com

Can assurances help investors find their faith again? Only time will tell.