Flying Tulip's Launch Challenges 'Never Break' Promise

Flying Tulip, a new project by DeFi architect Andre Cronje, launched its token generation event (TGE) on February 24. According to BlockBeats, the project, which claimed to be 'never break,' saw its token FT fall below the initial offering price of $0.1 shortly after launch, contradicting its promotional slogan of 'never break, principal protection.' The current price of FT is approximately $0.0989, with a circulating market cap of around $200 million and a fully diluted valuation (FDV) near $1 billion. Flying Tulip is positioned as an on-chain financial system, integrating spot trading, lending, perpetual contracts, and its own stablecoin, ftUSD. It emphasizes a 'native yield' model, deploying 100% of its fundraising into low-risk strategies like Aave and Lido, using only excess returns for operations and token buybacks, without team pre-mining or inflation. Its core feature is the ftPUT mechanism, granting public participants a permanent, unconditional 100% principal redemption right, allowing them to destroy FT and redeem BTC/ETH/SOL/stablecoins at the original investment value, theoretically setting the on-chain floor price at $0.1. Previously, the project completed a $200 million seed round and was oversubscribed in a CoinList presale, raising nearly $10 million. The public fundraising cap is set at $1 billion, with the project's FDV also reaching $1 billion, making it one of the larger protocol issuances in the 2026 market cycle.