After hacking the EMN protocol, Andre Cronje withdrew, but a group of investors now wants to drag him to court.
A group of investors is crowdfunding a lawsuit against Andre Cronje, the founder of the DeFi project Yearn.finance (YFI).
The subject of the legal dispute is the unfinished protocol Eminence (EMN) and its hack
In a blog post , the group, which calls itself EMN Investigation, announced that it is raising money to sue Cronje, Yearn developer “banteg” and Bitcoin Freedom user and Yearn advocate Blue Kirby. According to the blog entry, 100% of the donations will be used for the legal dispute. The collection campaign ends on November 9th. The investor group adds:
“To thank us for your donations, at the end of the fundraising campaign we will take a screenshot of the amount raised and distribute 50% of the equivalent value to the donors on a YFI hard fork. The remaining 50% of the hard fork in circulation will be given to the victims of the EMN scandal. We will build a new DeFi ecosystem in which there are no fraudsters. “
The said EMN protocol was hacked on September 29th, whereby the attackers were able to steal more than 15 million US dollars , of which they then transferred almost 8 million US dollars to Yearn founder Cronje. At the time of the hack, Cronje stated that he actually didn’t want to publish the minutes until three weeks later.
The EMN Investigation group claims that the protocol was at most in a test phase and accordingly accuses Cronje, Blue Kirby and banteg of having misrepresented the legitimacy of the project.
This is how the investors write:
“If EMN was really a test, the associated cryptocurrency had no value. Nonetheless, Andre just watched as $ 15 million was invested without saying anything. Rather, he fueled the project by sharing re-tweets. Why didn’t he at least warn the Yearn Finance team that they were buying and selling a worthless cryptocurrency? If developers from any other project were to sell a test token, they would be branded as scammers and lose their reputation. At best this was bad marketing and at worst it was fraud. “
Cronje has after EMN hack social media withdrawn because he has even received death threats in part as banteg confirmed to Cointelegraph. On October 9th, he wrote on Twitter that he continues to work on the development of the technology, but will no longer be active on the social network. Blue Kirby has again completely deleted his profile.
Despite the EMN scandal, YFI’s market value has risen 58% in the past few days , bringing the assets invested in the project to more than $ 900 million.