Andre Cronje, founder of Flying Tulip and creator of the Fantom network, said during Cointelegraph's Chain Reaction X Spaces show that most protocols branded as decentralized finance no longer meet the bar for true decentralization. According to Cointelegraph, Cronje said,
“I don't think DeFi exists anymore outside of those very small niches.”
Cronje's argument centers on a distinction between what DeFi originally promised and what most protocols have become. He described true DeFi as requiring decentralization, immutability and the absence of an intermediary — a standard he said “isn't really true for pretty much any other protocols running today.” In his view, the sector has evolved into something closer to “onchain finance”: a useful and legitimate category, but one that has quietly traded away the properties that gave DeFi its original meaning.
Teams running businesses, not immutable code
The core of Cronje's critique is that many protocols are now, functionally, “teams running for-profit businesses” — projects with upgradeable smart contracts, off-chain infrastructure and operational controls that let founding teams intervene when things go wrong. That flexibility is often defended as a safety feature, particularly as the industry debates whether circuit-breaker mechanisms should be built into protocols to halt activity during exploits, but it also concentrates power in ways that cut against DeFi's founding pitch of removing trusted intermediaries.
Related: Solana Came Within 4.5 Points of Losing Finality in a Routing Outage
Concentration isn't just a governance abstraction, either. Research from the European Central Bank found that the top 100 governance token holders controlled more than 80% of the supply across major protocols including Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth and Uniswap, based on holdings snapshots taken in late 2022 and mid-2023 — a concrete illustration of how far even flagship DeFi projects sit from the decentralized ideal Cronje describes.
