On February 17th, Flying Tulip (FT), an on-chain financial system founded by DeFi architect Andre Cronje, officially launched its public token sale. Previously, the project had completed a $200 million seed round and oversubscribed in its pre-sale on CoinList, raising nearly $10 million. This public offering has a maximum fundraising target of $1 billion, resulting in a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $1 billion, making it one of the largest protocol offerings in the 2026 market cycle.
Flying Tulip is built as a native yield-generating ecosystem, integrating spot trading, margin lending, and its own stablecoin, ftUSD. The protocol deploys 100% of its deposited funds to low-risk, high-liquidity yield strategies (such as Aave and Lido), capturing only the excess return spread for operations and token buybacks, unlike traditional DeFi models that rely on inflation incentives.
The core innovation of this public offering is the "ftPUT" model, an on-chain "perpetual put option" mechanism. All FT tokens issued in this public offering come with the right to redeem at their original investment value (supporting subscriptions in BTC, ETH, SOL, and stablecoins), forming an on-chain "floor price" protection of $0.10. When the secondary market price falls below this threshold, the automatic repurchase mechanism will be triggered. Cronje stated that this structure aims to emphasize the "refundable" attribute, prioritizing the safety of users' principal.
The project's token generation event (TGE) is scheduled for February 23. Flying Tulip is currently deployed on Ethereum, Base, and Avalanche, and plans to expand to MegaETH and Hyperliquid, positioning itself as a low-latency, cross-chain liquidity infrastructure for the "Agentic Economy." The market is focused on whether it can continue to deliver on its "principal protection" promise while expanding its TVI (Total Value Invested).
