Jayson Hobby, the former CEO of crypto lending and borrowing platform Compound, spent five years at the company trying to make it easier for investors to use their crypto holdings. But last year he left to create a startup with two other former Compound executives.
Now the three cofounders are preparing to launch Legend, which Hobby says will improve upon what he and his colleagues built at Compound. On Tuesday, Legend announced its first funding round, raising $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures.
“We just got really excited about trying to make awesome things, like Compound, more accessible,” Hobby said in an interview with Fortune.
Hobby said that Legend will attempt to serve as a more useful self-custody wallet—a digital wallet in which the user retains full control over their crypto holdings—than existing ones like MetaMask or Coinbase Wallet. Legend will bring decentralized financing to its users, he said, rather than forcing them to sign into multiple different applications to use their crypto.
When the Legend app launches—the app is currently in a test phase—users will have their own self-custody wallet embedded within the app, instead of having to download and create an account on an external app.
Hobby said he is working with popular DeFi applications to let users access various services without having to leave the Legend app. Users will be able to send and receive crypto in their Legend wallet through decentralized exchanges Uniswap and 0x. Users will also have access to Compound’s lending and borrowing services as well as another crypto financing service called Morpho.
He described this approach as a “walled garden.” Users won’t have to verify the legitimacy or trustworthiness of these applications themselves, he says, because Legend will have already done that. “You’re in this safe walled garden where nothing bad can happen because we’ve done all these integrations and removed a lot of the risk of interacting with DeFi,” he said.
Hobby says the company is focused on getting listed on the Apple App Store and building a reliable user base. In the future, Legend plans to generate revenue through subscriptions.
Legend isn’t the only company trying to bring DeFi under one roof. Infinex is among Legend’s competitors, providing access to DeFi services across multiple blockchains. But Hobby says that Infinex is taking a different approach than Legend by building a web-based platform rather than a mobile app. He also said that unlike Infinex, Legend is not focused on creating a native token.
The company will use the money raised in this round to accelerate the development of the Legend app by expanding the team and focusing on marketing. Hobby declined to disclose the company’s valuation.
