[Update, Aug. 14, 07:56 UTC: This article was updated to clarify Andre Cronje’s role in developing Fantom’s working network and his former role as Sonic Labs chief technology officer.]
Most decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols are no longer truly decentralized, according to Andre Cronje, founder of DeFi platform Flying Tulip and the technical architect who led the development of Fantom’s working 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 isn’t really true for pretty much any other protocols running today.”
It’s 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.
DeFi TVL, all-time chart. Source: 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 bloc’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) as “fully decentralized” services.
Related: Wintermute to pour $1B into AI, high-frequency trading amid TradFi expansion: Report
DeFi 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, it’s all the traditional kind of things we saw in banking. ”
However, Cronje argued that this doesn’t 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. The Sonic blockchain, whose design and development Cronje led as Sonic Labs chief technology officer, 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.
Magazine: Why Ethereum developers want ‘one-click staking’ for institutions
