Flying Tulip is the latest creation of Andre Cronje, one of DeFi’s most OG architects and the mind behind Yearn Finance, Keep3r Network, and Solidly. Cronje has spent nearly a decade shaping decentralized systems and is now building Flying Tulip as his final DeFi effort.
As he puts it: “While previous projects were designed to be decentralized as DAOs; this time I’m optimizing to have the incentives to build my legacy project”.
The team includes core contributors from the original Yearn and Solidly builds, executing on a vision to re-architect how on-chain liquidity, collateral, and yield interact across markets.
DeFi today remains powerful but deeply inefficient:
Flying Tulip rebuilds this foundation from first principles. Its adaptive AMM replaces fixed curves with live, depth-aware pricing that leans constant-sum in calm markets for tight spreads and shifts toward constant-product in volatility to protect LPs. Its credit layer enables both permissionlessness composable markets natively composable with AMM and CLOB market pairs, as well as cross-collateralization, allowing a single deposit to back multiple activities at once while still earning its base yield. USD-only debt assumptions are replaced by asset-consistent borrowing, enabling portfolio-level risk management across multi-asset vaults. And perpetuals, traditionally reliant on external oracles, instead settle to internal trading and depth data from the AMM and CLOB, updating in sub-seconds and eliminating oracle lag entirely. By centering the system on executable liquidity and a shared risk model, Flying Tulip removes barriers between products.
The AMM’s depth windows inform lending LTVs and liquidation thresholds; those same metrics govern perps leverage and funding. One deposit can secure multiple roles simultaneously: collateral, market-making, margin, earning first-of-a-kind unified streams of cashflows while the same cashflows route yield back to the FT token. The outcome is a unified system that breathes with the market, keeping capital productive across trading, lending, and derivatives, while enforcing strict risk coherence even in turbulent conditions.
True to Cronje’s ethos, Flying Tulip revisits one of DeFi’s most important ideas: the fair launch.
FT’s Public Sale introduces a transparent, 100% downside protected on-chain participation model where every contributor receives the same terms, mint rate, and redemption rights. This public, verifiable process is designed to set a new standard for fairness and accountability in token distribution.
Flying Tulip is a novel on‑chain financial primitive, developed by DeFi’s godfather Andre Cronje, that introduces several first-of-their-kind onchain financial innovations, standardizing pricing, credit, and risk across a suite of products: spot trading (AMM + CLOB), lending, perpetual futures, insurance, and a stablecoin for settlement rails (ftUSD).
The guiding principles are clear: