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

Most decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols are no longer truly decentralized, according to Andre Cronje, founder of DeFi platform Flying Tulip and creator of Fantom 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.