Most decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols are no longer truly decentralized, according to Andre Cronje, founder of DeFi platform Flying Tulip and creator of Fantom Network.
“I don‘t think DeFi exists anymore outside of those very small niches,” Cronje told Cointelegraph during Thursday’s Chain Reaction X Spaces show.
He argued that “true DeFi” needs to be decentralized, immutable and without an intermediary, adding: “That statement isnt really true for pretty much any other protocols running today.”
Its an idea that Cronje has been raising for months. Earlier this year, he said much of DeFi is “no longer DeFi” in the strict sense, as builders debate whether circuit breakers and other emergency controls are now necessary to protect users from exploits.
Total value locked (TVL) in DeFi more than halved over the past 10 months, to $75 billion at the time of writing from $167 billion in early October 2025, according to DefiLlama.
He‘s not alone in this thinking. The European Central Bank has also questioned whether decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are sufficiently decentralized to remain outside regulators’ scope. In a March working paper, the ECB looked at Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth and Uniswap and found that the top 100 governance token holders controlled more than 80% of the supply in each protocol, based on holdings snapshots from November 2022 and May 2023.
The ECB authors said these findings call into question the inherent decentralization of DAOs and whether they should remain outside of the blocs Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) as “fully decentralized” services.
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DeFis departed from decentralization
Cronje contended that DeFi departed from its inherent decentralization into a new financial paradigm called “onchain finance or open finance.” To support this, he said:
“We‘ve long since moved on from [DeFi]. Because your intermediary now is a company, it’s a decision maker, it‘s a curator, it’s a risk committee, its all the traditional kind of things we saw in banking. ”
However, Cronje argued that this doesnt exclude the existence of true DeFi and added that he still sees true innovation among some DeFi protocols.
Cronje is among the most respected founders in DeFi. Cronjes Sonic blockchain claims to be the fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine chain that reached a “true” 720-millisecond finality in a testnet environment.
Previously, Cronje founded Yearn.finance and the Keep3r Network.