So said Andre Cronje at the end of January on the very day that MIM was losing its peg after adding:

“I often speak about protocol to protocol, or robot to robot, I use to believe what we are building wasn’t for humans, it was for machines, a new machine currency, a way for our future machine overlords to transact, a mechanism that can exist long after we are extinct. I still believe this, but I have strayed.

In longing for acceptance, I started looking towards community, I started looking for comradery. I wanted to belong… I need to revisit my motivations.”

Now Anton Nell of Fantom says he and Cronje are quitting. Not a “rage quit” but “a decision that has been coming for a while now.”

Trustnodes reached out to Cronje to confirm as well as to ask why this decision was made and will update if a response is received.

Nell also says a number of projects will be “terminated” on the 3rd of April, with that presumably being whatever interface or domain they run as for the smart contracts, Cronje says they have “no human control.”

Yearn, Cronje’s Linkedin says he has quit that last month. This is a ‘strategies’ dapp that as a simple example gets a token, collateralizes it, sends it off to yield farm, and gives you back the profits with some kept by the strategy.

Fairly cool stuff that can maybe be called automated asset management, but for much of last year due to high network fees this wasn’t really accessible to anyone with $10,000 or less to strategize.

The whole defi space in fact has been seeing a very very cold winter last year while eth and cryptos were booming and then NFTs got all the attention.

“The amount of people I can have deep technical conversations with about the nuances of smart contracts and their intersection with digital finance, I can count on one hand. Of which, most have retired, or become so unmotivated they simply don’t care,” Cronje says.

Going from what we may have called person of the year in 2020 if we had found the time amid all the actual news, though there was stiff competition, to someone we had not heard of for quite some time until now, might go some way towards explaining his decision to quit which we’re not quite sure whether we believe it.

As might Solidly (code pictured featured image). This is a new Uniswap like exchange but on Fantom, which calls itself the first DAG based smart contracts platform.

“In crypto, you vote with your money. If you keep voting for low energy scams, get rich quick schemes, or low effort forks, you will only get more of those,” Cronje says.

Is that a suggestion he got caught up into that sort of stuff? Because where this aspect is concerned and for builders arguably there isn’t so much of a vote as a decision on whether to work on new original innovation or on copy pasta.

If there was a vote, it clearly hasn’t gone wrong because we’ve had many new innovative projects, and of course there has also been copy pasta and worse.

But you choose, you don’t vote. There is no democracy in crypto in as far as the majority decides, it’s more there’s a constitution, the code, and anyone can change that constitution as they please for themselves and those that want to follow them, but no one can change someone else’s constitution or make them follow them.

That’s a significant distinction between code and man or society. It’s not absolute, but it provides that actual choice, that most direct democracy if you will with simultaneous multiple universes or realities where you can choose to be.

That’s still a very new frontier, and overall the pipelines are still what in some years we’ll hopefully call ancient, and that the pioneers get lost somewhere, fall into some trap, lose patience, get cold feet, or are satisfied with what might look much but may be little, is perhaps to be expected.

Albeit a mistake in our view to leave at this stage just when things get a bit exciting for builders, but however arrogant it might sound, we probably won’t miss Cronje.

For he follows a long tradition, starting with Satoshi Nakamoto himself but there have been many others. Gavin Andresen, anyone remember him? Gregory Maxwell, not heard the name in years.

In ethereum too many of the co-founders left, with the revolving carosell clearly not applying just to mining pools, but also to people.

Each time however there have been more to take their place, a lot more. For the frontier may well be covered with pioneers, but once the road is travelled, it gets safer for all the rest.

Keepe3r, this is a tokenized forex of sorts, and is still one project Cronje is working on at least according to his Linkedin.

All the other projects will also probably keep on. Fantom has confirmed as much, while confirming Nell has left.

They’re decentralized and if there was any regulatory issue, this is a way of proving as much. If instead it was a fully volunteer choice, well goodbye and thanks for all the fish.

Especially now that we can afford to use these dapps again and make the new conquered land more habitable as the exploration continues.