Flying Tulip

Flying Tulip was founded by Andre Cronje in 2025, building on Deriswap, the 2020 concept that merged trading, lending, derivatives and insurance into one cross-margin system.

On September 29, 2025 Flying Tulip announced a $200 million private round with more than a dozen investors including Brevan Howard Digital, CoinFund, Susquehanna Crypto and FalconX.

Flying Tulip's structure introduced an onchain redemption right: primary buyers can burn FT at any time and reclaim their principal in the asset they contributed, effectively a perpetual put option with no expiry.

Flying Tulip says the team receives no initial token allocation and can only gain through open-market buybacks funded by protocol revenue, with a fixed supply of 10 billion FT.

On January 23, 2026 its native stablecoin ftUSD went live on Sonic, held by delta-neutral strategies, with users able to stake into sftUSD for yield.

On February 23, 2026 Flying Tulip's FT held its TGE and began trading on Sonic, priced at $0.10 in the primary sale for roughly a $1 billion fully diluted valuation, with a public sale targeting up to $800 million.

By February 20, 2026 Flying Tulip disclosed $183.9 million of capital actually funded and held, well below the $200 million commitment first announced.

In June 2026 Cronje resigned from the Sonic Labs board, saying his main focus for the previous 18 months had been Flying Tulip, and stayed only as a technical advisor.

FT uses a fixed supply of 10 billion tokens with no inflation, minting 10 FT per $1 contributed, with early participants receiving a perpetual exit right (ftPUT). Protocol revenue is continuously used to buy back FT on the open market, and team and incentive unlocks are also tied to revenue-funded buybacks (split 40:40:20). On September 4, 2026, Trade and TRS products went live with cumulative buybacks exceeding 1 million tokens; on September 18, Rewards launched, allocating 20% of protocol revenue to users in market-bought FT; on September 29, the protocol expanded to BNB Chain, its third deployment.

In the week of October 2, 2026, total fees generated reached $109,340 with cumulative buybacks of 1.393 million FT, Lend TVL of $20.55 million and ftUSD supply of $4.75 million. Also on October 2, Binance's tokenized QQQ (QQQB) was listed as collateral, with the team stating FT will support all tokenized stocks.

Flying Tulip completed large-scale fundraising and a token sale in 2026. In January the project raised an additional $25.5 million in a private token round (Amber Group, Fasanara Digital, Paper Ventures), bringing total institutional capital to $225.5 million at a $1 billion valuation; together with $50 million via Impossible Finance's Curated platform and allocations on CoinList, soft commitments reached about $1.36 billion. The public sale opened February 16 with FT priced at $0.10 (about $1 billion FDV) and a $1 billion per-user deposit cap. Every private and public allocation carries a "perpetual put" on-chain redemption right, letting investors burn FT anytime to redeem up to their original principal (e.g. in ETH). Funds are deployed into low-risk yield strategies such as Aave (targeting ~4% annually); the first products, the ftUSD stablecoin and margin lending, launched in February, with prior protocol TVL above $126 million.

Flying Tulip's Future strategy and roadmap: Flying Tulip treats its own funding structure as the moat: deposits instead of a raise, principal protection to buy scale, capital parked in low-risk strategies with only the excess spread retained, and team exposure built through revenue-funded buybacks rather than an initial allocation. That frees it from needing a high-valuation exit at launch, but it also means revenue must cover the yield promise, operations and buybacks at once. ftUSD is the hub of that flywheel, where deposit yield, trading fees and liquidation income settle in one place; the outcome depends on taking market-making and arbitrage flow from centralised exchanges and established perpetual venues such as Hyperliquid, not on shipping a fuller front end.

Andre Cronje, founder and CEO, is a South African developer born in Cape Town. He read law at Stellenbosch University from 2001 to 2003, completed a three-year computer science course at CTI Education Group in five months in 2005, then lectured there, led a technical team at Vodacom from 2006 to 2008, and was CTO of a mobile apps firm, mobile development manager at Altron, software architect at Full Facing and technology head for Shoprite's Mfin division. In 2018 he entered crypto via Lemniscap, led technology and innovation at the FUSION Foundation and became the originating technical architect of Fantom's working network, implementing it with Quan Nguyen. He created Yearn Finance and Keep3r Network in 2020, proposed Deriswap that year, designed the ve(3,3) model and joined Fantom's board in 2022, later served as CTO and board member of Sonic Labs, and resigned from the board with Michael Kong and David Richardson in June 2026 as Matt Visser became CEO. He now focuses on Flying Tulip, is also CTO of the zkTLS project Witnessnet and runs a small, remote, experiment-driven team.

Flying Tulip perpetual futures are settled by voluntary settlement liquidity providers who post ftUSD, earning a per-settlement fee of around 0.05% per settlement, subject to protocol policy.