Andre Cronje's Flying Tulip raises $200 million at $1 billion token valuation

Flying Tulip, the new crypto project founded by DeFi veteran Andre Cronje, has raised $200 million in a private seed funding round to build an onchain exchange that spans "all of DeFi" — including spot, derivatives, lending, stablecoins, and insurance under one system.

The $200 million round was structured as a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT) and values Flying Tulip’s token at a $1 billion fully diluted valuation (FDV), Cronje told The Block. The raise began on Aug. 14 and closed within a month, with no single lead investor. Participants included Brevan Howard Digital, CoinFund, DWF Labs, FalconX, Hypersphere, Lemniscap, Nascent, Republic Digital, Selini, Sigil Fund, Susquehanna Crypto, Tioga Capital, and Virtuals Protocol, among others.

Flying Tulip now plans to raise up to another $800 million through a public sale of its FT token at the same $1 billion valuation. The sale will be hosted on Flying Tulip's own platform, not on existing ICO platforms, Cronje said.

The fundraise with 'onchain redemption right'

One distinctive feature of Flying Tulip’s raise is the "onchain redemption right," also described as a perpetual put. Investors in both private and public rounds can burn FT tokens at any time to redeem up to their original principal in the asset they contributed, such as ETH. Cronje said this model is designed to give investors downside protection while maintaining "unlimited upside."

"The [perpetual] put means none of these funds can be used, so actual raised is [zero]," Cronje said, adding that instead, the plan is to deploy up to $1 billion of potential raised capital into onchain strategies via protocols such as Aave, Ethena, and Spark. With a ~4% annual yield target, that pool could generate roughly $40 million per year to fund growth, incentives, and buybacks.

"Recurring yield funds Flying Tulip’s growth and incentives, securing downside protection through a perpetual put while preserving unlimited upside via the FT token," Cronje said in his pitch deck to investors and shared with The Block. Revenues will cycle back into token buybacks, ecosystem incentives, and higher yields — creating what he called a "self-reinforcing growth flywheel."

Cronje noted that the design was shaped by his past experience. “As a founder who has been involved in two large token projects; Yearn and Sonic, I know the pressures from a token,” he wrote in the deck. “The token itself is a product. If the price ever dips below where investors joined, this leads to short term decision making choices that might benefit the token at the cost of the protocol. Providing a mechanism where the team has comfort that there is a floor and ‘at worst’ investors exit what they put in, this greatly reduces this stress and overhead."

Redemptions will be managed by audited smart contracts with safeguards like queues and rate limits to protect solvency. If reserves are temporarily insufficient, requests enter a transparent queue and are processed as capital replenishes. FT tokens remain non-transferable until the public sale is complete. Team members get no initial allocation; instead, compensation will come from scheduled open-market buybacks funded by protocol revenue, tying their upside directly to performance, Flying Tulip said.

Building a full-stack exchange

Flying Tulip is pitched as a full-stack onchain exchange integrating spot trading, derivatives, lending, money markets, a native stablecoin (ftUSD), and onchain insurance into a single cross-margin system.

"It isn't 'a DEX,'" Cronje said. "It's a ground-up rebuild of lending, trading, AMM [automated market maker], CLOB [central limit order book], derivatives, insurance, and stablecoins, each with their own unique innovations."

Cronje said competitors vary depending on scope — Coinbase and Binance at a holistic level, while at the product level, rivals include Ethena, Hyperliquid, Aave, and Uniswap.

The exchange is still under development, with Cronje describing launch timing as "sooner than people think, later than people hope." Flying Tulip builds on the original Deriswap concept Cronje introduced in 2020 to merge multiple DeFi functions into one platform.

At launch, Flying Tulip will support Ethereum, Avalanche, BNB Chain, Sonic, and Solana, with more networks to follow. The initial rollout, however, will be hardened on Sonic, where fee monetization and subsidies allow Flying Tulip to offer zero-fee trading, before the full suite is deployed to other chains, Cronje said.

Revenue will come from trading and lending fees, liquidations, ftUSD yield, and insurance. Flying Tulip currently employs about 15 people across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and is actively hiring, Cronje said.

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