Andre Cronje's Flying Tulip raises additional $75.5 million at $1 billion token valuation

Flying Tulip, a new DeFi platform being built by crypto veteran Andre Cronje and his team, has raised additional capital through a mix of private and public token sales.

The private token Series A round raised $25.5 million from Amber Group, Fasanara Digital, and Paper Ventures at the same $1 billion fully diluted valuation as the project’s earlier seed round, Cronje told The Block. Flying Tulip previously raised $200 million in a seed round last September, bringing total institutional capital raised to date to $225.5 million.

Beyond institutional funding, Flying Tulip has also attracted significant retail interest tied to its ongoing and upcoming public token sales. Cronje said the project has raised $50 million so far through Curated, a DeFi deal platform operated by Impossible Finance, as part of a round that accounts for a portion of Impossible’s $200 million allocation.

A separate $200 million allocation has also been set aside for CoinList, which is beginning next week. Beyond those allocations, Flying Tulip plans to open additional whitelist rounds to fill the remainder of its targeted $1 billion raise, Cronje said.

While total soft commitments currently stand at about $1.36 billion, only around $400 million of capacity remains, assuming the Impossible Finance and CoinList allocations are fully filled, Cronje said. He added that both platforms have already seen interest in the billions, suggesting the remaining capacity could be filled once public access opens.

All of Flying Tulip’s fundraising has been structured at a consistent price of $0.10 per FT token and at a $1 billion fully diluted valuation, with full onchain redemption rights attached to all private and public rounds, Cronje said.

Those redemption rights, which Flying Tulip refers to as a “perpetual put,” allow investors to burn their FT tokens at any time to redeem up to their original principal in the asset they contributed, such as ETH. Cronje has previously said the model is intended to provide downside protection while preserving upside exposure.

"The [perpetual] put means none of these funds can be used, so actual raised is [zero]," Cronje said previously, 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, he added at the time.

Flying Tulip is building an onchain exchange that brings multiple DeFi functions into a single system. The platform combines spot trading, perpetual futures, lending, and a native stablecoin called ftUSD, with plans to add insurance and options over time. According to Cronje, the system is designed to adjust trading and lending parameters based on real-time measures of liquidity, volatility, and usage, rather than relying on fixed rules, as part of its approach to adaptive onchain risk management.

Key parts of the platform are expected to go live following Flying Tulip’s token generation event, which is expected to occur after the completion of its pending public token sales.

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