‘DeFi doesn’t exist anymore,’ just onchain finance: Andre Cronje

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.

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DeFi’s 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. Cronje’s 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.

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