Finance Redefined: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it? Jan. 6–13

Finance Redefined is Cointelegraph's newsletter focusing on the latest events and trends of DeFi, delivered to subscribers every Wednesday.

This week I wanted to highlight Andre Cronje’s recent confession on Medium, which triggered a fair bit of discussion and quite a bit of salt from Uniswap team members. This particular spat occurred because he complained about developers just forking someone else’s code and launching it themselves. For those unaware of the irony, this is basically what SushiSwap, a Yearn ecosystem member, initially did to Uniswap.

More importantly, Cronje also complained about what he perceives as an entitled DeFi community, and the concept of giving tokens away without a founder’s stake.

Cronje’s argument can be summarized as follows: DeFi users are largely speculators who are paid to use the projects, and see price action as the ultimate sign of their success. No matter what kind of work the developer puts in, the community will always only care about the number going up and will personally hold the developer accountable if it fails to do so.

Finally, Cronje warns against giving away tokens. Development costs for Yearn apparently exceed the value of the few tokens he farmed. Essentially, launching a product that attracted hundreds of millions of dollars made him poorer.

Cronje’s categorization of the DeFi community can be applied to the entire crypto ecosystem. I also believe that it’s just a natural consequence of the fact that there are tokens to get rich off. Would you ever join the Discord or Telegram chat for, say, Bank of America? Costco? Coca-Cola?

There are definitely some people who have fun interacting with these huge brands. By and large, though, without a financial stake in the company you really don’t care about what it’s doing on a daily or monthly basis. Do you think there could ever be an enthusiastic community behind Swift, the banking infrastructure l...