The vision is simple: onboard the next 100M users by making DeFi easy to use. Today, we’re excited to announce our first milestone on that journey as Legend has completed a $15M seed fundraise. The round was led by a16z crypto with participation from Coinbase Ventures.

Our mission is to elevate DeFi from a group of enthusiasts to mainstream adoption. We aim to redefine the onchain experience through a unified interface that solves one of blockchain's biggest challenges: the user experience.

DeFi is the future

Web3 is shaping the future of global finance. DeFi introduces greater efficiency, real-time interest rates, lower costs, and user-controlled assets—enhancing, rather than replacing, traditional financial systems.

While protocols like Morpho, Aave and Uniswap have grown into scalable, widely-used platforms, accessibility and fragmentation remain a challenge. We want to tackle the user experience, allowing protocol teams to focus on innovation and security while we focus on access.

What is Legend?

Legend is a mobile-first, DeFi platform designed to make onchain finance easy to use. Users can earn, borrow, and trade directly with DeFi protocols through native integrations.

Unlike traditional wallets that simply provide access, Legend has DeFi built in. Powered by an embedded smart contract wallet, Legend streamlines the experience by removing common pain points—no complex wallet connections, no risky third-party websites.

At launch, Legend will prioritize Layer 2 blockchain support, with a strong focus on EVM chains (especially Base), ensuring fast, low-cost transactions for users.

Enabling Mass Adoption

Every major tech shift follows the same pattern: it starts as a niche, then a few companies make it effortless—and suddenly, it's everywhere. Uber didn’t invent paying for a ride across town. Robinhood didn’t invent stock trading. But they made them effortless.

Legend aims to do the same for DeFi.

Of the estimated 617M global crypto holders, only an estimated 30-60M actively transact onchain (source). That gap represents an opportunity–to convert crypto-curious users into onchain participants by making it easy to use.

The infrastructure is here, it’s time for the rise of the application. In 2019, due to high network costs, you’d often spend more in network fees than you would earn in yield. But with the growth of L2s, transaction costs have been reduced by over 99% (from $10s of dollars per transaction on Ethereum mainnet to fractions of a penny on L2s). With the addition of other infrastructure advancements—Account abstraction, passkeys—it’s finally possible to bring this infra together to elevate DeFi to the global stage.

We believe financial services should be open, transparent, and always on. DeFi isn’t going to replace the financial system we have today; it’s here to upgrade that system, help it grow and adapt for the next century. Traditional finance has long relied on intermediaries, who introduce inefficiencies and the need for costly oversight–and all those costs are eventually shouldered by the end user.

Moving finance onchain smooths out a majority of the costly inefficiencies in today’s financial system. With built-in transparency and programmable building blocks, the requirement of many intermediaries is removed and end users benefit from the trickle down efficiency gain and cost savings. DeFi has the potential to expand global economic freedom for all, and Legend is helping turn that vision into a reality.

What's Next

Legend's waitlist has surpassed 400,000 signups since its introduction in October 2024. Beta invites began rolling out this month, with a public App Store launch planned for later this year.

Sound interesting? Sign up on the waitlist to get in line, and follow our progress on X. Legend is also hiring for multiple roles.