Jack Paul 
Andre Cronje, the creator of Fantom Network and founder of DeFi platform Flying Tulip, says most so-called decentralized finance protocols have drifted away from the original idea. He told Cointelegraph during Thursday’s Chain Reaction X Spaces that “DeFi doesn’t exist anymore” outside a few small niches. His point is simple: real DeFi should be decentralized, immutable, and run without an intermediary. By that standard, he argues, nearly every protocol operating today falls short.
This isn’t a fresh position for Cronje. Earlier this year, he already warned that much of DeFi was no longer DeFi in any strict sense. Builders keep debating whether circuit breakers and emergency controls are necessary to protect users from hacks. But adding those safeguards also means adding a level of control that contradicts the original promise.
The numbers behind the shift
The broader market seems to reflect some of that unease. Total value locked in DeFi has dropped from around $167 billion in early October 2025 to about $75 billion at the time of writing, according to DefiLlama. That’s a decline of more than half over roughly ten months. People may simply be less willing to lock funds into platforms that no longer feel fully decentralized.
Cronje isn’t the only one raising doubts. The European Central Bank published a working paper in March that looked at Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth, and Uniswap. Based on holdings snapshots from November 2022 and May 2023, the top 100 governance token holders controlled more than 80 percent of the supply in each protocol. That concentration makes it harder to argue these organizations are truly decentralized. The ECB authors suggested such findings question whether DAOs should remain outside the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation as “fully decentralized” services.
Onchain finance as a new label
Cronje thinks DeFi has moved into something he calls onchain finance or open finance. It’s a different category, not necessarily a bad one. He still sees genuine innovation in some corners of the space. But he wants to be honest about what most projects actually are.
That distinction matters. Words like decentralized get used loosely, and the gap between the label and reality keeps widening. Cronje’s background gives him some credibility here. He previously founded Yearn.finance and Keep3r Network. His current Sonic blockchain claims to be the fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine chain, reaching 720-millisecond finality in a testnet environment.
Maybe the debate isn’t whether DeFi is dead. It’s whether the industry can admit that most of what it built is now just finance running on blockchains, with human governance and backdoors. That might not be the original dream, but it could be a more honest description.