After two years of operations, decentralised finance (DeFi) mobile “superapp” Legend has announced the shutdown of its operations. Legend was a DeFi aggregator that mainly aimed to bring DeFi to its users, rather than forcing them to sign in to multiple different wallets or applications to use their crypto. The protocol is yet to disclose active user counts or total value locked (TVL) figures, as it operates as an aggregator, but the TVL for the broader DeFi ecosystem has fallen close to 50 percent since October. The CEO of Legend confirmed that the app will keep running normally for the next 60 days and will go offline on July 12.
Legend CEO Says Product Did Not Reach Required Scale
Jayson Hobby and former Compound Finance executives launched Legend in late 2024. The protocol is a noncustodial, mobile-first DeFi aggregator, which is used for earning, trading, borrowing, and swapping assets like stablecoins and Ether via integrations with other DeFi protocols such as Aave, Compound, and Uniswap. The core objective of Legend was to bring DeFi to its users rather than forcing them to sign multiple wallets to use their own crypto.
Announcing the company’s closure with a post on X, Hobby said, “We started with a bet that on-chain finance could feel as simple as the apps people already trust. We believed the right interface could put DeFi’s most powerful primitives in front of mainstream users. The Legend product found a real audience, but didn’t grow to the scale the company needed to be sustainable long-term. Closing is the right call for our team and our investors […] The product that wins isn’t the one that explains crypto better, it’s the one that hides it completely. The benefits are felt, not explained.”
Earlier this month, Carrot, a Solana-based decentralised finance yield protocol, also announced that it was permanently shutting down operations. Carrot stated that the Drift Protocol exploit was catastrophic and had left it financially bleeding and unable to continue. The platform has set May 14 as the deadline for users to withdraw their remaining funds.
In the growing list of DeFi exchanges shutting down this year, another exchange is the Solana DeFi aggregator Step Finance, which announced the closing down of its operations after a $40 million treasury wallet breach in January, along with Polynomial, which also ceased operations in February. Balancer Labs, the team behind the DeFi protocol Balancer, also shut down operations in March following the financial pressure of a $116 million hack in November. Meanwhile, due to volatile market conditions, Seamless Protocol, which is a DeFi lending protocol on Base, also announced that it will be winding up in April.
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