TechFlame News: Andre Cronje, founder of DeFi platform Flying Tulip and creator of the Fantom Network, said that most DeFi protocols are no longer truly decentralized, with only a few niche areas still deserving the DeFi label. In his view, DeFi has evolved into "on-chain finance" or "open finance." He pointed out that true DeFi should feature decentralization, immutability, and the absence of intermediaries—yet in most current protocols, the intermediaries have become corporations that now take on the roles of decision-makers, risk committees, and other traditional financial institution functions. Cronje noted that this doesn't mean true DeFi has vanished entirely, as some protocols are still innovating. According to DefiLlama data, total value locked (TVL) in DeFi has dropped from $167 billion in early October 2025 to $75 billion at the time of the original report—a decline of more than half over the past 10 months. In a working paper published in March, the European Central Bank (ECB) analyzed Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth, and Uniswap, finding that based on holding snapshots from November 2022 and May 2023, the top 100 addresses holding governance tokens in each of these protocols controlled over 80% of the token supply. The ECB used this to question the level of decentralization of these DAOs and whether they should still be treated as "fully decentralized" services exempt from the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). (Cointelegraph)