Andre Cronje, the Flying Tulip founder and creator of the Fantom network, says the industry should stop calling most of what exists today “DeFi.” In his view, true decentralized finance requires three things at once: decentralization, immutability, and the absence of intermediaries. Almost nothing left in the space clears that bar. “I don’t think DeFi exists anymore outside of those very small niches,” he said.
Cronje’s argument is that the sector didn’t collapse so much as quietly mutate. Protocols that once ran on immutable, permissionless code now lean on decision-makers, curators and risk committees to manage parameters, list assets and respond to exploits — functionally similar to how a bank’s credit committee operates, even if the balance sheet is onchain. “We’ve long since moved on from DeFi,” he said. “Because your intermediary now is a company.”
The Numbers Behind the Shift
The trend shows up in the data. Total value locked across DeFi has fallen from roughly $167 billion in October 2025 to about $75 billion at the time of writing — a decline Cronje’s framing casts less as a simple bear-market drawdown and more as capital rotating out of protocols that never met the “true DeFi” bar to begin with, back toward centralized venues and custodial products offering similar yields with less operational overhead.
Research Backs the Centralization Claim
Cronje’s critique lines up with what regulators are now finding when they look under the hood of DeFi governance. A European Central Bank working paper published in March examined governance token holdings across Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth and Uniswap and found the top 100 addresses on each protocol typically control more than 80% of the voting supply. On Aave and Uniswap specifically, the top five holders alone captured close to half of all governance tokens, with roughly a third of the largest voters impossible to identify from public data alone.
That concentration is precisely the dynamic Cronje points to: governance that looks decentralized on a dashboard but functions, in practice, through a small group of insiders, treasuries and exchanges making the calls. The ECB researchers framed their findings as a warning to regulators tempted to use governance token holders or developers as a clean legal “anchor point” for oversight, since so much of the real decision-making power sits with parties who can’t easily be identified or held accountable.
What Cronje Means by ‘Onchain Finance’
Rather than treating this as a failure, Cronje frames it as a natural evolution: protocols are becoming “onchain finance” or “open finance,” where the ledger is public and settlement is fast, but governance and risk management still run through recognizable corporate structures. For builders and users, the distinction matters less as a branding exercise and more as a reset of expectations — the immutability and censorship-resistance many early DeFi users assumed they were getting was, in a growing share of protocols, never fully there to begin with.
