Andre Cronje: Most of the DeFi agreements are no longer really centralised

In a recent programme, the Fantom core developer, Andre Cronje, stated that the majority of the de-centre finance (DeFi) agreements were no longer truly de-centre. In his view, “real DeFi” required decentralised, non-mixable and non-intermediated characteristics, a definition that was no longer met by the vast majority of the agreements currently in operation. Cronje states that with the introduction of traditional banking structures, such as smelting mechanisms, emergency controls, policymakers, pedagogues and risk committees, DeFi has evolved into a new financial paradigm called “onchain finance” or open finance, at the expense of some of the pre-existing non-removable and decentrized features. DeFiLlama data show that the total stock of DeFi (TVL) has been halved over the past 10 months from $167 billion in early October 2025 to $75 billion。