Andre Cronje: The Biggest DeFi Boom Is Yet To Come (Entire Thesis)

**Robbie** (0:00)
We are live with Andre Cronje, true DeFi OG in the building with us here today. It's not his first time, you guys know him well. I'm sure you guys have seen his products on chain before, probably deposited into one, if not a few of them, Yearn, Sonic, list goes on. Today, we're gonna be talking about Flying Tulip.
As I mentioned earlier, very unique launch strategy here, fundraising strategy as well. So we're gonna get into some of that. This is our weekly Stablecoin show powered by Frax. And so Frax is doing great work. Genius compatible Stablecoin, open Stable borderless.
Andre, man, it's a pleasure to welcome you back to The Rollup.

**Andre Cronje** (0:42)
Likewise. Nice to be back.

**Robbie** (0:45)
Absolutely.

**Andre Cronje** (0:45)
Don't think it was that long ago I was on here, or at least it doesn't feel that long ago.

**Robbie** (0:49)
I think it was just a few months, actually. What have you been up to?

**Andre Cronje** (0:54)
Rollup mostly, trying to get products online as quickly as security allows and hopefully as fast as investors want, which is always a interesting tug and pull game, I think.

**Robbie** (1:16)
Do you find yourself wanting to ship faster than investors want you to?

**Andre Cronje** (1:22)
No, no, no. I mean, investors always want everything live yesterday. Security is always the biggest constraint, because audits is one thing.
I think while audits are very important, they're a little bit overplayed in this space and not overplayed. Too much emphasis is put on only audits and then a lack of infrastructure security, key security, secondary order securities, things like circuit breakers or outflow monitoring. And those things take time, like capped launches, slow approaches. And it also creates user friction, which in itself isn't nice, because you end up limiting what your users can do at any given point in time, and that also prevents scaling.

**Robbie** (2:17)
Yeah, I just saw there was a recent thing, there was a vulnerability on Ostium, the Perpdex, and $18 million left the protocol like that. And people are calling, yeah, that's why circuit breakers exist. They're a feature, not a bug. And so, yeah.

**Andre Cronje** (2:34)
Historically, circuit breakers didn't really make sense because there were only two interacting parties. It was the depositor and the smart contract. There was nothing else. There was no multisig. There was no, you know, off-chain counterparty.
So old, we've inherited a lot of the design principles of old DeFi into this new category where we are now, which is closer to on-chain companies than it is decentralized finance.
So, you know, back then, if you had a smart contract and someone could not have instantaneous liquidity, you'd be dead in the water right off the bat. Nowadays that you have, you know, a line of communication, a support channel, people you can reach out to. I think the assumptions are very different, and circuit breakers now make sense as well, right? The circuit breakers are there, and our system is also multiple layers of circuit breakers. And I've seen the friction it causes for users, you know, because a user might be used to, or the fear it can cause, right? Because using our circuit breaker as an example, we, when you request the funds out, it goes into a queue, and then you can claim it in six hours. But now, myself sometimes, while using the system, I'll claim it, and I'll go check on EFIRScan, and I'll see, oh, it didn't go to my wallet, it went to 0xcb, which is our circuit breaker.

**Robbie** (4:18)
Yeah, I've seen this.

**Andre Cronje** (4:19)
But, you know, in my mind, I'm like, holy crap, what went wrong? Meanwhile, you know, it's just sitting there waiting to be released so that I can claim it in a few hours.
But something as simplistic as that, you know, causes fear and panic from a user's perspective.

**Robbie** (4:30)
Yeah, yeah. And hopefully we can solve some of that with UX developments, right? And a lot of this is, you know, going to be obfuscated or underneath the hood. And, you know, the I think a lot of one of the building principles that I've heard from developers as of recently has been, look, we're building for the next cohort of users, not necessarily the crypto native ones that have been here and are the most sophisticated. You know, we're OK with sort of showing something on the UX side, right?
And underneath, right? We know that, you know, it's in the circuit breaker, it's going to get claimed, but we're going to show the number as if it's, you know, still with the user because ultimately it will be and sort of maybe take some shortcuts that, you know, back in, you know, the more the DeFi purest days wouldn't have really been within the realm of what people would have been accepting.