It’s hard to believe how much has happened in the past week. As I was working on Yearn’s newsletter for this week– I was reminded that we all heard of EMN for the first time less than a week ago. Since it’s been a few days, I’ve had some time to think about it. A thread:

The first thing that came to mind is that an event like this is exactly the kind of shit @AndreCronjeTech has always been afraid of. He’s talked about this in almost every interview he’s given– it’s why he says “I test in prod”, it’s why he stopped publishing APY for the vaults,

and it’s why he didn’t want to share that his code was audited. When people stop evaluating contracts on their own or evaluating risk and abdicate their own responsibility for their funds– that’s when things can get dangerous and bad things can happen.

Honestly– between all of the food farm ponzis that popped up over the past few months, I think it’s miraculous that more funds haven’t been lost. And I think it gave everyone a false sense of security. And then $EMN happened.

I think this also hit at a bad time for defi overall. The defi market peaked in early-mid September, euphoria began to fade, and it seems that the days of 100% APY being normal are behind us. While this was bound to happen, it has definitely fed into a good amount of negativity.

Looking at Andre’s reaction, I think he did all we could ask. The most amazing thing to me is that he is taking these steps not for himself– but to protect everyone else. The man is going to secretly deploy test contracts now so you don’t start using them before they’re ready.

The fact that he needs to take these steps to prevent millions of dollars from being dumped into his freshly-deployed contracts is fucking MINDBLOWING to me.

I think it speaks to his celebrity in the space, but also speaks to my point above about the YOLO mentality that, until now, has made most of us lots of money with little consequences.

I’m sure many would like to point out to @bluekirbyfi as the reason they jumped into EMN. But Kirby did what Kirby does– he saw something fun and interesting and shared it with the world to hype them up. He didn’t make you mint or swap for that $EMN. So please, don’t #blamekirby.

Coming back to things I’ve heard Andre talk about on podcasts– people love builders as long as the products work well, but as soon as something goes wrong, it's all hate. If you shit on builders when anything goes wrong, then no one will want to fucking build– it’s that simple.

Yearn Finance was always designed for sustainable, risk-adjusted yield– from v1 onward. I’m a small part of the system, but I know this– moving forward, the Yearn team is going to keep building (both on the dev side and on the docs/design side), because that’s what we do.

So this thread isn’t just a bunch of negativity, here’s a bunch of things I’m excited for in the Yearn universe (yOctober, anyone?)
BTCUSD Maker whitelisting/ YFI Maker collateral
v2 vaults
yETH v2 strategy
Vault token swaps– Curve, SnowSwap, creamY
New yUSD
And more…