DeFi Godfather Andre Cronje Accuses Protocol of Stealing Code, Community Speculation: Could It Be It?

Fantom Foundation director and co-founder of Sonic Labs, Andre Cronje, announced in an article on X today that he has discovered a project with a total locked in asset value (TVL) of $1 billion and a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $1 billion. The project used his open-source code (licensed under GPL3), but repackaged it under BUSL license.

In other words, this project has changed the GPL3 license code that should have remained open source to a commercially restricted license, which may limit the right of others to freely use or distribute this code. This is often seen as a violation of the terms of the original GPL3 license, as it deprives the code of its open source attributes.

Andre Cronje criticized:

I can accept not being acknowledged, I can accept them removing my name from the code, and I can even accept them not mentioning me or the original project at all in the website or documentation, and going to great lengths to repackage certain concepts to avoid any connection. But they take something from open source, then switch to restrictive licensing, and make a lot of profit from it... This feels really bad... The changes in this field are much bigger than I imagined

Many people speculate that the project accused by Andre Cronje is likely based on Base Aerodrome, which, in addition to TVL, FDV, and Andre Cronje's description, is largely derived from the decentralized trading platform Solidly built by Andre Cronje in the past.