Andre Cronje says DeFi has moved away from its original vision of removing intermediaries

DeFi has moved away from its original goal of eliminating financial intermediaries and toward businesses using blockchain as the infrastructure for financial products and services, Andre Cronje, Flying Tulip’s founder, said in a recent interview with Cointelegraph.

“That’s probably the biggest deviation… of that shift in what the original want was and what even I was striving toward back then versus sort of what it’s become now, which is more just companies that use blockchain technology to provide a certain service or feature,” said Cronje, when asked what he got right and wrong about DeFi over the past five to nine years.

He explained that early DeFi was built around the idea of removing brokers, banks and other middlemen, with immutable smart contracts allowing users to interact directly with financial agreements.

According to Cronje, however, the limits of immutability became increasingly clear as DeFi expanded into more complicated financial products. In lending, for example, the risk associated with collateral can change over time, making it difficult for a protocol to operate safely if its rules can never be updated.

“Because the world is not an immutable place, so it needs a non-immutable solution,” he said.

Cronje described this as a major departure from the original DeFi model. The industry, he said, is now increasingly made up of “companies that use blockchain technology to provide a certain service or feature.”

While he did not argue that this model is inherently bad, he said it represents a fundamentally different vision from the early movement that focused on removing intermediaries.

He noted that immutable contracts can still work well for narrow applications such as “small little escrow contracts” and swaps, but they are harder to apply to complex financial systems.

He also questioned whether a better user experience could make self-custody suitable for everyone. Cronje argued that features such as password recovery and customer support necessarily introduce intermediaries and reduce the degree to which users are directly interacting with blockchain infrastructure.

He warned that the security risks have also grown substantially, saying crypto-related phishing attempts that were once occasional have become “multiple per day.”

Cronje’s Flying Tulip aims to turn DeFi into an all-in-one financial system

After creating Yearn Finance and contributing to several prominent DeFi and blockchain projects, Cronje founded Flying Tulip, an integrated on-chain financial platform that launched publicly in February 2026.

Flying Tulip is designed as an integrated DeFi platform that brings trading, lending, borrowing, stablecoins, liquidity and derivatives together in one capital-efficient system. The project aims to reduce the fragmentation of DeFi by allowing liquidity to be reused across different financial products and supporting multiple blockchains from a unified platform.

In September 2025, Flying Tulip completed a $200 million private round at a $1 billion fully diluted valuation, supported by investors including FalconX, Brevan Howard Digital, DWF Labs, and Virtuals Protocol.