Keep3r Network is a decentralized “keeper” platform for projects that need external DevOps and for external teams to find keeper jobs.
What does it mean?
A “Keeper” is a person or team that executes a specific job - whether it be development or business operations. As smart contracts become more complex, there sometimes appears a requirement for an external interaction to help with the smart contract’s upkeep.
Currently, each project takes on this smart contract upkeep role individually. DeFi functions such as Aave liquidations and Synthetix Cache Updates were coordinated by the team to find an external Keeper to design and maintain the smart contract’s upkeep.
As a result, Andre Cronje designed Keep3r to provide a decentralized coordination ecosystem to find keepers to upkeep smart contracts.
If a project is looking for a Keeper to perform specific duties, they just need to submit their contract to the Keep3r Network, and Keepers can begin fulfilling the required work.
The platform is designed to protect jobs that carry a more extensive financial risk. For these types of jobs, the project can choose to make sure that Keepers only execute them if they have a minimal financial KPR (Keep3r Token) bond.
It seems that Andre Cronje is actively keeping the community updated on Keep3r through his Medium profile and appears to be posting regular posts since the Keep3r Network v1 contracts were released on October 28th.
In a post on October 27th, Cronje stated that the smart contracts had been audited but did not mention which company conducted them;
How Investors & Community Reacted to Keep3r?
KP3R, the Keep3r v1 token, launched on October 28th at the valuation of around $28. Since then, it went briefly to $366 - over 1000% price increase in just 1-day! Then it settled down at $200 levels
In the same short period, the total liquidity for the KP3R-ETH Pair Liquidity Pool on Uniswap has already surged to $14.7 million. On top of this, it reached $100M in volume in the first days. However, the hype cooled down pretty quick and people trade around $15M worth of assets in that pair.
Even before the token went live, people were already waiting to get into it (or in other words: to ape)
At the same time, a handful of people were not so easily convinced. It seems that they haven’t forgotten the Eminence Finance attack so quickly and had to voice their concerns;
We can’t deny that Andre Cronje is an innovator within the space, and anytime he puts out a project, it will gather much attention. However, there is a bunch of angry investors who ran too quickly into unaudited contracts and suffered a loss.
What about YFI?
With Andre releasing a fresh new project, many prior investors wonder what will happen to his last project - Yearn Finance (YFI).
When Andre first announced that he was getting ready to release a fresh new project on October 27th, it seemed that YFI investors were not the slightest bit pleased. In fact, the Total Value Locked in YFI dropped from $452 million on October 26th to reach as low as $332 million on the day of the announcement as investors started pulling their funds while fearing Cronje was walking away from Yearn.
The price for the coin has also been falling ever since the announcement. On October 26th, YFI was trading above $14,400 and has since dropped to the current price of around $10K levels
However, upon closer inspection, it seems that Keep3r might actually be a complementary project to Yearn Finance - and an entire handful of other Dapps.
In a recent AMA with the Yearn Finance team, they stated that there is a full-time team of developers that are still actively working on Yearn Finance. When asked if Andre is still a part of Yearn, they responded by stating that “Andre does still work closely with the Yearn’s developers, but his main focus is developing new projects” - this shows us exactly where Andre’s focus lies - he keeps pushing forward and exploring new paths. And I think that's totally fine.
Further, in the AMA, the Yearn team continued to state that Keep3r will be an essential utility network for Yearn. It will be relying on Keep3r in calling the Harvest() Function of the vaults promptly - showing some form of partnership already developing between the two projects.
This clearly shows that Cronje’s new project can complement his old projects, such as Yearn Finance and any other DeFi project.
For now, it seems that the community might be split about the impact on Yearn Finance and where Keep3r will end up.
Whatever happens, we can still expect it to be breaking news if Andre Cronje is involved.
