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Flying Tulip

Fintech · New York City, United States · Founded 2024

Flying Tulip is an on-chain financial marketplace founded by DeFi architect Andre Cronje, co-founder of Sonic Labs (formerly Fantom Foundation). The project aims to create a full-stack, on-chain exchange that unifies multiple decentralized finance (DeFi) services into a single, capital-efficient system. In September 2025, Flying Tulip announced it had raised $200 million in a private seed funding round at a $1 billion fully diluted valuation. The company plans to raise up to an additional $800 million through a public sale of its $FT token at the same valuation. The platform integrates a native stablecoin (ftUSD), a money market, spot and derivatives trading, lending, options, and on-chain insurance within a single cross-margin, volatility-aware system. This integrated approach is designed to solve issues of capital efficiency and fragmented liquidity prevalent in the DeFi sector. By combining these financial primitives, the platform allows users to access spot, margin, and perpetual trading from a single liquidity pool, reducing friction. Its business model will generate revenue from trading and lending fees, liquidations, ftUSD yield, and insurance. A distinctive feature of Flying Tulip's fundraising is the "onchain redemption right," or "perpetual put." This allows investors in both private and public sales to burn their $FT tokens at any time to redeem up to their original principal in the asset they contributed, such as ETH. This mechanism is designed to provide investors with downside protection while preserving upside potential. The raised capital seeds a segregated on-chain reserve to programmatically settle redemptions. Furthermore, the team receives no initial token allocation; instead, their compensation comes from open-market buybacks funded by protocol revenue, aligning their incentives with the platform's long-term performance. Initially launching on Sonic, the platform plans a multi-chain deployment, including support for Ethereum, Avalanche, BNB Chain, and Solana. Keywords: on-chain financial marketplace, DeFi, Andre Cronje, decentralized exchange, cross-margin system, capital efficiency, ftUSD stablecoin, derivatives trading, on-chain insurance, perpetual put, onchain redemption right, tokenomics, Sonic Labs, blockchain finance, spot trading, money market, crypto lending, decentralized finance, financial primitives, liquidity pool