Jack Paul 
Andre Cronje, the founder of Flying Tulip and creator of Fantom Network, says most decentralized finance projects no longer deserve the label. He told Cointelegraph during a Chain Reaction X Spaces show that DeFi, in his view, only exists in very small niches today.
True DeFi, he argues, needs to be decentralized, immutable and without an intermediary. That standard, he said, barely applies to any protocol running right now. He has made this point for months. Earlier this year, he said much of DeFi is no longer DeFi in a strict sense. The debate often centers on safety features like circuit breakers. Builders use emergency controls to protect users from exploits, but those controls also make protocols less independent.
Governance is concentrated
The European Central Bank has similar concerns. In a March working paper, it looked at Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth and Uniswap. The top 100 governance token holders controlled more than 80 percent of the supply in each protocol, based on holdings snapshots from November 2022 and May 2023. The authors said that raises questions about how decentralized DAOs actually are. It could also matter for regulation. If a DAO is not fully decentralized, it might not stay outside the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation.
The numbers point to a smaller market
DeFi has also shrunk in dollar terms. Total value locked fell from $167 billion in early October 2025 to around $75 billion at the time of writing, according to DefiLlama. That is a drop of more than half in about ten months. The market clearly looks different from what it once was, though locked value does not tell the whole story.
Toward onchain finance
Cronje believes much of what people call DeFi has turned into something else. He describes it as onchain finance, or open finance. That may sound like a small wording change, but the meaning matters. Systems with intermediaries, recovery controls or governance concentration are not really DeFi in his view.
That does not mean he has given up on the idea. He still sees genuine promise in some smaller protocols. Cronje has a long history in this space. He created Yearn.finance and Keep3r Network before starting Sonic, a blockchain that claims to be the fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine chain with 720-millisecond finality in a testnet environment. Whether the label survives may depend on how those projects choose to build.