Group raising funds to sue Andre Cronje over EMN hack

A group of investors is crowdfunding a lawsuit against Yearn.finance (YFI) founder Andre Cronje over the unreleased and unfinished Eminence (EMN) protocol and its hack.

In a post, the group EMN Investigation said it is raising money to sue Cronje, Yearn developer ‘banteg,’ and Twitter user and Yearn supporter Blue Kirby. The group said 100% of the donations would be used to finance the lawsuit. Crowdfunding will end on November 9. The group added: 

“As a way to thank you for your donation, we will take a snapshot at the end of the crowdfunding campaign, and airdrop 50% of the supply of a fork of YFI to donators. The other 50% of the supply will be airdropped to the victims of the EMN scandal. We will create a new DeFi ecosystem, but without the bad actors.”

On September 29, the EMN protocol was hacked. The hacker stole $15 million, but then transferred $8 million back to Cronje. Cronje has said that he did not intend to release EMN for another three weeks at the time of the hack. 

EMN Investigation claimed if the project was a test with no value yet, Cronje, Blue Kirby, and banteg should not have promoted the project as much. The group said: 

“If EMN was a test, it had zero value as a token. Yet Andre watched as $15 million poured in without a word. But kept hyping the project by retweeting. Why didn’t he at least warn the Yearn Finance team that they were buying and selling a worthless test token? If developers from any other team started hyping and selling a test token, they would be accused of fraud and the entire team would lose legitimacy. At best, this was a viral launch gone bad, at worst, it was a rugpull.”

Cronje dropped out of social media following the EMN hack citing death threats, which banteg confirmed to Cointelegraph. He tweeted on Oct. 9 that he has not stopped developing technology but has stepped back from Twitter. Blue Kirby has since deleted his Twitter. 

Despite the EMN issue, YFI surged 58% in the last few days, with its total locked value hovering above $900 million.