Andre Cronje, founder of the DeFi platform Flying Tulip and creator of the Fantom Network, said most DeFi protocols no longer meet the original standard of decentralized finance and are better described as "onchain finance" or "open finance." Speaking during Thursday's Chain Reaction X Spaces show, he said true DeFi should be decentralized, immutable and free of intermediaries, but argued that many protocols now rely on companies to make decisions and manage risk in ways that resemble traditional financial institutions. Cronje added that genuine DeFi has not disappeared entirely and said some protocols are still innovating in niche areas. The comments come as DefiLlama data shows total value locked in DeFi fell to $75 billion from $167 billion in early October 2025, and as a March European Central Bank working paper found that the top 100 governance token holders in Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth and Uniswap controlled more than 80% of supply in snapshots from November 2022 and May 2023. The ECB said those concentration levels raise questions about how decentralized those DAOs are and whether they should continue to be treated as fully decentralized services outside the scope of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA.