Yearn Finance's founder says he 'doesn't build for speculators'

The founder of Yearn Finance, Andre Cronje, has seen a fair share of criticism lately as he deployed some smart contracts that ended up losing users' money.

Cronje defended himself in a blog post and explained why he believes he shouldn't be held responsible for those who "Ape in" his testing contracts.

Before a contract makes it to the mainnet, it goes through a rigorous process of unit, interaction and composite testing.

There are many versions of existing products like Yearn Finance that were deployed to the mainnet without being discovered.

"There are over 22 'yearns' on ETH mainnet. There are over 5 'YFIs' on ETH mainnet," he added.

In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Cronje said that the reason why his primary projects were never hacked was: "Ironically, because I test in prod." With this approach, he says he is able to iterate over the real issues that come up, instead of relying on auditors to review pre-production code.

One case of people getting burned on Cronje's smart contracts involved one of these testing playgrounds, which were still at least a few weeks away from public release.

Addressing these issues, Cronje noted, "I don't build for speculators." While he said that he could not rationally understand the people who rushed into his test environments, he seems to have conceded that a more pragmatic approach may be needed.

In the meantime, he pledged to not use his well-known deployer address to conduct further tests.

The post follows another instance of people losing money over one of his contracts, an unnamed project often referred to by its token ticker, LBI. The contract was deployed on the mainnet on Oct. 13 and immediately triggered a torrent of people putting their money into it, with many calling it "The new YFI.".