Andre Cronje: DeFi is dead, now it's just "On-chain Finance"

BlockBeats News, August 13th, Fantom founder and former Sonic Labs co-creator Andre Cronje recently stated: I believe that DeFi no longer exists beyond those very small niche areas. Currently, the vast majority of DeFi protocols are for "on-chain finance" or "open finance." True DeFi needs to meet the three conditions of decentralization, immutability, and no intermediaries, and this description no longer applies to almost any protocol today.

Andre Cronje explained that today's intermediaries are a company, a decision-maker, a curator, or a risk committee, "all of which are things we have long seen in the traditional banking industry. True DeFi still exists in some niche projects, and I can still see some real innovation."

According to DefiLlama data, the total value locked in DeFi has dropped from $167 billion in October 2025 to the current $75 billion. In a working paper released in March by the European Central Bank, the decentralization level of DAOs was called into question—snapshot analyses of Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth, and Uniswap showed that the top 100 governance token holders control over 80% of the supply for each protocol, raising the question of whether they should be exempt from MiCA regulation as "fully decentralized" services.