Andre Cronje says DeFi is dead, long live ‘onchain finance’

Andre Cronje, the developer who helped define DeFi with Yearn Finance, now wants to retire the term entirely. In a guest post published on August 10, Cronje argued that what the industry calls DeFi has quietly transformed into something fundamentally different: “onchain finance.” The distinction isn’t just semantic. Cronje contends that modern DeFi protocols bear little resemblance to the immutable, teamless, permissionless systems that gave the movement its name. They have paid development teams, upgradeable smart contracts, operational infrastructure, and governance structures that look a lot more like traditional finance than the crypto-native idealists of 2020 ever intended. From Yearn to Flying Tulip: a philosophical 180 Cronje launched Yearn Finance with minimal team involvement and fully decentralized principles. His current project, Flying Tulip, is essentially the opposite. Flying Tulip operates as an integrated onchain financial ecosystem. It bundles collateral management, lending, trading, perpetual contracts, insurance, and its own stablecoin, ftUSD, into a single platform. The project completed a $200 million private funding round in September 2025 at a $1 billion valu...