I’m excited to announce that we’re leading the $15M seed round in @joinlegend to simplify DeFi & help bring the next 100M users onchain.

While DeFi activity has grown, it has also become more complex, & remains too complicated for many people to use. Legend is pointing the way to a simpler user experience & broader adoption. Their first product is an embedded smart contract wallet that allows users to borrow, lend, or swap across chains without manual wallet connections or the risk of interacting with malicious websites.

Legend’s founders @json, @hayesgm, & @mykel all worked together at DeFi pioneer Compound. Geoffrey was an inventor of the Compound protocol, and a co-founder of Compound Labs. Mykel & Jayson worked together on product and design at Compound Labs before Jayson took the reins as CEO.

With their user-facing product expertise and empathy for DeFi developers, the Legend team is perfect to address the UX challenge that’s still hindering DeFi adoption. We’re delighted to support them.

Feels like a deja vu... Stop throwing products at people and think that "UX" is the hurdle! Start with really understanding normal people first. This is defi from the multi-million SF ivory tower, where people have plenty of money.

A normal person on the street does not:
- Want to "swap tokens", they want to spend their salary on groceries, a night out or rent. 
- A normal person is not going to borrow from defi products that are meant for leveraging up token positions, a.k.a. compound where you can only borrow less than your collateral. Normal people take out loans because they don't have the money yet, aka need to gain a certain credit trust based on real world salary to get it from a bank. 
(1/2)

Experimenting, Fun, DeFi, Consumer Crypto & Ghouls

- A normal person is looking, if they have some spare money to invest or save for a secure, convenient way to earn yield on their dollar. Defi can play a role here, but I doubt you need a $15m seed round for this. Making them deposit into lending protocols might be an interesting angle, but also here we need to understand if an average person is willing to risk this for the few % more they get in Aave compared to their bank.

I'm a strong advocate for the power of self-custody vs centralized banks. But approaching it as a "UX hurdle/problem" is not the starting point. More product and problem based thinking is needed for adoption. Play a meaningful and real role in normal people's live, with products that are useful for them. It has been proven and proven again that clunky UX is not a hurdle if you have a useful product (look up Nikita Bier). Users will go through hoops if it is useful. (2/2)