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KP3R Andre Cronje, founder of DeFi platform Flying Tulip and founder of Fantom Network, said that most decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols are no longer truly decentralized. "I think DeFi doesn't exist anymore, except in very niche areas," Cronje told Cointelegraph on Thursday's Chain Reaction X Spaces program. He believes that "true DeFi" needs to be decentralized, untamper and unmediated, adding: "This statement does not hold true for most other protocols currently in operation."
This is a point that Cronje has been emphasizing for months. Earlier this year, he said that many DeFis are "no longer DeFis" strictly speaking, as developers discuss whether to introduce circuit breakers and other emergency controls to protect users from attacks. According to DefiLlama data, DeFi's total locked position value (TVL) has more than halved in the past 10 months, from $167 billion in early October 2025 to $75 billion at the time of writing.
He is not the only one with this idea. The European Central Bank also questions whether the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is decentralized enough to be exempt from regulatory constraints. In a working paper in March, the ECB studied Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth and Uniswap and found that based on position snapshots from November 2022 and May 2023, the top 100 governance token holders in each agreement control more than 80% of the supply. The ECB authors said the findings raise questions about the inherently decentralized nature of DAOs and whether they should remain outside the EU's Cryptographic Asset Markets Regulation Act (MiCA) as a "fully decentralized" service.
Cronje believes that DeFi has deviated from its inherent decentralization and evolved into a new financial paradigm called "on-chain finance or open finance." In support of this view, he said: "We have long said goodbye to DeFi. Because the intermediary now is a company, a decision-maker, a curator, a risk committee-these are the traditional roles we see in banking." However, Cronje also pointed out that this does not rule out the existence of real DeFi, adding that he still sees real innovation in some DeFi protocols.
Cronje is one of the most respected founders in the DeFi field. The Sonic blockchain he founded claims to be the fastest Ethereum virtual machine chain, achieving a "true" 720-millisecond final confirmation in a testnet environment. Previously, Cronje also founded Yearn.finance and the Keep3r network.
