Building in #DeFi sucks

Andre Cronje
3 min readFeb 29, 2020

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Not a sensationalist title, honestly it sucks. It’s expensive, the community is hostile, the users are entitled.

When I started building yearn.finance, I thought to myself, here is something 100% free, fee-less, honestly a common good that makes good yield with low risk, how could people not be happy with it?

So let’s talk about the stuff we aren’t suppose to talk about, shall we? You know, the stuff people will tell me after this article to “suck it up” its “part of the game”

Let’s start with the users;

No matter what you do, they will be unhappy, and they will make a point of telling you so;

These are just two samples, but honestly, these negative statements occur daily, and again, I don’t know what these people expect? I mean, I’m a one man team, I don’t have funding, I don’t have support, I’m not charging fees or making any revenue, I can’t do customer support 24/7, how am I suppose to operate? And let’s not forget the constant comparisons and “soft shills”;

Next up, the community;

Constantly looking for any bit of information to pick you apart;

Do me a favor and just read that last poll

And did any of these other community supporters contact me privately to first get information? Or attempt to understand the picture before they did full demands in public on twitter? Nope. I had to wake up at 3AM to do further explanations on twitter (that were demanded of me), which I was already busy writing a medium post for, and I mean, it’s on-chain data people, not like anyone can’t look at the transactions!

It’s expensive;

The expenses I explained in a previous post, and aren’t really relevant to this specific rant, so just going to skip over it for now.

Plea for change

Honestly, if this keeps up, we won’t see people trying to innovate in this space, all we see are teams constantly trying to attack each other and break each other down, or teams that come in, do a quick ICO raise, and then dissapear. While this is the status quo, why would anyone try to build something here?

I need to seriously reflect and consider if I still want to be involved in a space this antagonistic and hostile. Especially when I try to do this as a common good.

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