Regulations
By Steven Anderson
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TVL Collapse Tells the Story. Total value locked across DeFi protocols fell from $167 billion in October 2025 to $75 billion…
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ECB Research Backs Cronje's Governance Fears. Cronje isn't alone in pointing this out. The European Central Bank published a working paper in…
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Sonic Chain and What Cronje Is Building Instead. Despite all the criticism, Cronje is still building.
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Andre Cronje is blunt about it. Most DeFi protocols, he says, aren't really DeFi anymore — they've become something else entirely, something he calls "onchain finance.
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Cronje, founder of Flying Tulip and the Fantom Network, made the remarks during a recent appearance on the Chain Reaction X Spaces show.
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Total value locked across DeFi protocols fell from $167 billion in October 2025 to $75 billion currently, per DefiLlama. That's a brutal drop.
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And the trust problem is structural, not just cyclical. Cronje's argument is that protocols started making pragmatic concessions — adding protective layers, giving developers…
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He's not saying every project sold out. He acknowledged that some protocols still operate without intermediaries and stay true to the original principles.
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Cronje isn't alone in pointing this out. The European Central Bank published a working paper in March that looked hard at several major decentralized autonomous organizations,…
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See also: CoinFellos Fello 2 AI Agent Returns 100% of Swap Fees to Users on Monad
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That's a real regulatory problem, not a theoretical one. If regulators decide that governance token concentration disqualifies a protocol from decentralized status, the legal and…
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So Cronje's critique isn't just philosophical. It's got regulatory teeth now.
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Despite all the criticism, Cronje is still building. His current project, the Sonic blockchain, claims to be the fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine chain running — testnet finality…
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His track record is hard to dismiss. Yearn.finance, the Keep3r Network, Fantom — Cronje built things that actually got used, at scale, by real people.
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See also: Wintermute Bets $1 Billion on AI Trading as TradFi Push Targets 50% of Revenue
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