Another Bubble Pops, Eager Investors Pile Andre Cronje’s New Project

Andre Cronje stands as the creator of Yearn Finance, and has recently, and stealthily, published his third protocol on GitHub since August. This latest protocol, published on the 19th of October, was dubbed Keep3r Network.

Connecting Laborers With Employers

There was no formal launch announcement from Cronje himself, and Keep3r’s own documentation made it clear that the protocol was in its beta stages. Even so, investors that are far too bullish for their own good toppled over each other to invest in this project. As one would imagine, very few of them walked away with a profit, most of them losing big.

Keep3r is planned as a gig-style decentralized market specializing in technical jobs powered by its own native token: The KPR. The platform was developed with the goal of aiding crypto projects lacking in manpower to be able to access specialized technology and labor.

Chasing The End Of A Rainbow

The documentation for Keep3r shows task examples as complex as mandating extensive off-chain logic, or be as simple as calling a transaction, with Keep3r supporting it all. Alongside this, employers will be capable of paying KPR to contractors by way of fees that they earned on Uniswap by farming KPR and Ether.

The project was spotted by individuals following either Cronje’s Ethereum address or Github account, as Cronje had directly interacted with the code by way of his personal wallet.

Some People Never Learn

Much like the fiasco that resulted from the Eminence protocol, a number of extremely bullish investors, alongside their bots, poured money into the platform, and started to trade the token on Uniswap, as well. This caused KPR to see its price skyrocket from $1 to $2,000 in thin volume. The token was subsequently dumped back below the $100 range thanks to Cronje redeploying Keep3r contracts multiple times as he tested the code.

While damaging, this wasn’t as catastrophic as the $15 million in crypto that was drained from Eminence after investors went full bullish on it. Cronje announced the work-in-progress network, went to bed, and woke up to a collage of death-threat made by angry investors. Luckily for Cronje, and those that invested in an untested protocol, the hacker had deposited half the funding to Cronje, who promptly distributed what he had to disgruntled investors.

The entire event caused Cronje to shy away from social media for almost two weeks, and made him vow to maintain a low profile going forward.