• As two lead developers at Fantom announce exit, 25 DApps and services will witness termination by April 3.
• The Fantom Foundation assured the community that it will continue with future developments as scheduled.

One of the biggest Layer-1 Ethereum-competitors – Fantom (FTM) – is witnessing a major price crash. In the last 24 hours, the Fantom (FTM) price has corrected over 20 percent and is currently trading at $1.34 with a market cap of $3.46 billion. With this, FTM has further slipped to the 37th rank in the crypto market list.

Last weekend, news broke out that Fantom’s lead developer Andre Cronje has decided to step back and take a break from crypto. Cronje has been very instrumental in building the Fantom ecosystem and taking it to new heights.

Anton Nell, Cronje’s partner at Fantom will also step down while confirming the news. However, the bad thing is that the apps these two developers helped build shall also be shutting down. The two developers have received some hate with respect to the launch of the DeFi project Solidly on the Fantom blockchain. Some market experts believe that it could be a possible reason for the exit, but Nell confirms it otherwise. In his Twitter post on Sunday, March 6, Nell wrote:

Andre and I have decided that we are closing the chapter of contibuting to the defi/crypto space. There are around ~25 apps and services that we are terminating on 03 April 2022.

Unlike previous “building in defi sucks” rage quits, this is not a knee jerk reaction to the hate received from releasing a project, but a decision that has been coming for a while now. Thanks you to everyone that supported us over the past few years.

Fantom’s DeFi TVL crashes

Fantom, the project which enjoyed a dominant position in terms of the DeFi TVL, witnessed a major crash. Fantom’s total-value-locked (TVL) in DeFi saw a sharp 20 percent on Sunday.

Although Andre’s leaving the Fantom ecosystem had sharp reactions, the lead developer said that they are “completing handovers”. Meaning, the affiliated projects would still be able to run independently of Andre. The Fantom Foundation also came up with an explanation later on Sunday, March 6. It also talked about the important upgrades coming to the Fantom ecosystem. The tweet notes:

We’re extremely grateful to Andre for all he did for crypto as a whole. However, Fantom isn’t and never was a one man team. The development of Fantom won’t be impacted by Andre’s decision.

Big things are coming, as scheduled. We’re still on track to ship snapsync and a db upgrade in the short term and to release middleware improvements such as flat storage and the fvm.

Although replacing Andre won’t be an easy job in terms of the contribution he holds to Fantom. But for the believers of the project and long-term investors, this could be a good time for Dollar-cost-averaging (DCA).