Fantom Foundation issues clarification statement about departure of Andre Cronje and Anton Nell

Recently, media outlet Rekt.news made striking accusations about Fantom Opera, a layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution, after the foundation’s technical adviser Andre Cronje and senior solutions architect Anton Nell announced they were leaving the crypto space entirely. Almost immediately, concerns from the community arose after Nell tweeted, “There are around ~25 apps and services that we are terminating on 03 April 2022.” In the now-deleted Rekt article, it alleged the following:

“Fantom, Solidly, SpookySwap, Abracadabra, Geist: multiple projects all entwined into a system designed to extract maximum value for a small set of insiders who are now steadily exiting the stage.”

However, on Friday, the Fantom Foundation published a statement regarding alleged “factual inaccuracies,” “debunked claims” and “misinformation” from the Rekt piece. Specifically, the Fantom Foundation stated:

“Andre and Anton did not ‘terminate’ 25 projects. Instead, any involvement (such as user interface) in these projects was to be handed over to the existing teams, many of whom had been developing and running independently.”

Moreover, the foundation explained that neither Cronje nor Nell was a core developer at Fantom and that the entity itself was not involved in creating any of the 25 projects (including, most notably, Yearn.finance) in question. It appears that in part due to the pair’s departure, the total value locked on Fantom has fallen to $8.27 billion from $11.26 billion on Sunday, the date of the announcement. The blockchain has processed over 200 million transactions with more than 2 million active wallets since its inception.