PANews reported on January 28 that Andre Cronje, co-founder of Sonic Labs (formerly Fantom), published an article detailing the reasons for his withdrawal from the DeFi field in 2022. He said that despite strict compliance with regulatory requirements when developing projects such as Yearn and Keep3r, without financing, token sales or personal gains, he still received investigation letters from the US SEC starting in 2021.

Cronje mentioned that these letters initially requested detailed information about YFI, and then gradually escalated, involving investigations from multiple angles, including whether the Yearn vault constituted an "investment tool". Since the project did not establish a legal entity, he lacked legal support and needed to spend a lot of time and resources to respond to the investigation. In the end, these pressures forced him to stop development work and choose to withdraw from public activities after two years of legal disputes.

Despite this, Cronje said he was unable to give up his love for decentralized finance, and after his exit, he remained committed to researching and developing new projects and planned to launch new DeFi primitives.