Fantom price, TVL collapse 21% as devs plan to retreat

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.