PANews reported on September 30th that Flying Tulip, a new crypto project founded by DeFi veteran Andre Cronje, has secured $200 million in private seed funding. The company aims to build an on-chain exchange spanning the entire DeFi landscape, encompassing spot trading, derivatives, lending, stablecoins, and insurance. The $200 million round, raised in the form of a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT), values Flying Tulip's tokens at a fully diluted value (FDV) of $1 billion. The funding round, which launched on August 14th and closed within a month, did not include a single lead investor. Participants included Brevan Howard Digital, CoinFund, DWF Labs, FalconX, Hypersphere, Lemniscap, Nascent, Republic Digital, Selini, Sigil Fund, Susquehanna Crypto, Tioga Capital, and Virtuals Protocol.

Flying Tulip now plans to raise up to an additional $800 million through a public sale of its FT tokens at the same $1 billion valuation. Cronje stated that this sale will be conducted on Flying Tulip's own platform, rather than leveraging an existing ICO. The fundraising will feature an "on-chain redemption right," allowing investors to burn FT tokens at any time to redeem a portion of their initial investment in assets. Redemptions will be managed by an audited smart contract, with safeguards such as queues and rate limits in place to ensure solvency. In the event of a temporary shortage of reserves, requests will be placed in a transparent queue and processed once funds are replenished. FT tokens are non-transferable until the public sale is complete. Team members will have no initial allocations, and their compensation will be based on planned open market buybacks funded by protocol proceeds, directly tying their upside to performance.