On February 16, 2026, the highly anticipated on-chain financial system Flying Tulip (FT), founded by renowned DeFi architect Andre Cronje, officially commenced its public token sale. The launch follows a month of intense institutional interest, including a successful $200 million seed round and a heavily oversubscribed pre-sale on CoinList that raised nearly $10 million.
The project is designed as a comprehensive, natively yield-bearing ecosystem integrating spot trading, margin lending, and a proprietary stablecoin called ftUSD. With a fundraising cap and a fully diluted valuation both set at a staggering $1 billion, Flying Tulip represents one of the largest and most ambitious protocol launches of the 2026 market cycle.
A core innovation is the "ftPUT" model, a programmatic "Perpetual PUT" option. Under this structure, all FT tokens issued during the sale carry a permanent right to be redeemed for their original investment value in the currency of purchase (BTC, ETH, SOL, or stablecoins). This creates an on-chain "floor price" of $0.10 per token, with an automatic buyback mechanism triggered if the market price falls below the redemption threshold. Cronje has characterized this as a "refundable structure" prioritizing user safety, aiming to manage a large treasury rather than seeking a high-valuation exit.
The protocol's core strategy involves deploying 100% of deposited funds into low-risk, high-liquidity yield strategies like Aave and Lido, capturing only the excess spread to fund operations and token buybacks, moving away from traditional inflationary rewards.
Positioning itself as a foundational layer for the "agentic economy," Flying Tulip focuses on low-latency, cross-chain liquidity—currently operational on Ethereum, Base, and Avalanche—to accommodate the micro-settlements required by autonomous AI agents. The Token Generation Event (TGE) is scheduled for February 23, with the project considering further expansion to MegaETH and Hyperliquid.
