Andre Cronje, the founder of Sonic, wrote that pressure from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission led to his abrupt departure from the cryptocurrency industry in 2022.
In one New blog postCronje described a long struggle with the regulator who eventually forced him to step away from public involvement in the decentralized finances.
Cronje, best known for launching an annual financing in 2020, said that he deliberately collected funds or selling tokens to avoid the regulatory investigation. In 2021, however, he received his first investigation of the Securities and Exchange Commission to request details about the investors and profit distribution of Yealn Finance.
Although he is not a citizen of the United States and would never do business in the country, he kept the request and collected extensive information for several weeks.
The SEC continued his research and sent additional letters that Cronje described as increasingly aggressively. In the course of time, the focus shifted from an alleged violation of securities to the question of whether the safes of Yancalse qualified as investment vehicles. These questions, he said, consumed his time and resources, so he had to stop development work.
“After two years of needing to deal with this every month, and endless sleepless nights and stress,” Cronje wrote that he chose to leave.
He emphasized that his departure was not due to dissatisfaction with Defi, but rather the toll of constant regulatory investigation.
Behind the scenes
Although he took a step back from the public eye, Cronje continued to work behind the scenes on blockchain projects. He now says that he is launching almost new Defi initiatives.
He also noted that the recent shifts in the leadership of the SEC felt at ease to share his experience, because earlier researchers warned him to speak against.
“Given the new direction of the SEC, I finally thought that I could actually write about this, because I was previously strongly advised by the same researchers not to mention the research or it could escalate,” wrote Cronje.
