Andre Cronje’s Flying Tulip Gears Up for Public Sale

The DeFi super application space is facing headwinds following the Infinex token generation event (TGE) in January, but despite the adverse market conditions, Yearn Finance founder Andre Cronje is launching Flying Tulip’s (FT) public sale next week.

Flying Tulip confirmed the sale date on Saturday, and prediction markets are giving the platform a 50-50 chance of trading above a $400 million fully diluted valuation (FDV), albeit on low volumes.

For comparison, Infinex’s INX token is trading at a $121 million FDV, leaving ICO participants at a 60% loss from its $300 million ICO valuation.

Flying Tulip looks to fill a similar niche as Infinex, offering users a single platform that allows them to leverage some of DeFi’s most popular applications, including perpetual derivatives trading, spot trading, and lending.

However, Cronje has highlighted that the “Flying Tulip FDV is not standard FDV.” In a traditional model, FDV equates to the total supply multiplied by the token price, whereas the FT token includes an underlying put option, making it “closer to a NAV valuation than FDV.”

The protocol raised $200 million from the likes of Brevan Howard and DWF Labs in September, followed by a $25 million raise at a $1 billion valuation in January, $55 million via Impossible Finance, and $10 million via CoinList last week.

Flying Tulip is the YearnFi founder’s latest DeFi endeavor after Fantom, the Layer-1 blockchain that rebranded as Sonic. While Sonic started out hot, the token has struggled over the last year and is down 96% from its launch price, trading at a $160 million FDV.