SBF

Chapter 20Liquidity Mining

Very quietly, in February 2020, a guy named Andre Cronje—largely unknown at the time—published a Medium post about releasing iearn.finance, a set of smart contracts that were meant to be a simple way for him to start managing his stablecoins and earning a little more off them.

That iteration, iEarn, sought yield.

Basically, he had figured out that he could make more money investing in stablecoin dollars and sticking them inside various new DeFi projects than he could sticking fiat dollars in banks. Also, Cronje was the kind of guy who liked finding strategies for making extra money and, because he was a programmer, he liked to automate them.

So he wrote smart contracts that would move his stablecoins around as needed each day, chasing the best sources of yield. This was old‐fashioned yield, just plain old interest on deposits or fees on trading.

With that Medium post, he invited other people to also deposit their stablecoins in iEarn and ride along on his strategies with him.

The post is a funny post, because he makes no effort to sing the praises of what he had built. Usually, a launch post in crypto (and tech in general) is so loaded in ebullient spin that it can be very hard to discern what the launched product actually does, but most of Cronje's first iEarn posts complain about how much he spent on gas fees to deploy his smart contracts—zero hype.

Nevertheless, and this was not at all evident yet, Cronje had built a yield‐hunting robot that would ...