The team behind DefiLlama, a decentralized finance (DeFi) analytics platform, has forked the project amid a dispute with the leadership. The move came after someone who allegedly controls DefiLlama’s Twitter and domain name attempted to launch a token without broader approval.

What is DefiLlama?

DefiLlama describes itself as the largest Total Value Locked (TVL) aggregator for DeFi. It tracks the total value of all assets locked into DeFi protocols across various blockchains, including Ethereum (ETH), Terra (LUNA), Avalanche (AVAX), Fantom (FTM), Cardano (ADA), and more.

More specifically, DefiLlama keeps track of analytics data for DeFi applications (DApps), DeFi chains, DeFi oracles, DeFi forks, DeFi airdrops, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), liquidations, fees, trading volume across different chains, hacks, and more.

DefiLlama also offers a meta-dex aggregator, an aggregator of decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregators. This tool queries the price across various popular DEXes, including 1inch, Cow Swap, and Matcha, and then offers users the best price. The aggregator doesn’t take any fees.

The project has grown in popularity over the past couple of years as it allows users and researchers to see which chains are the biggest and how DeFi is growing. It can also help crypto users find trending chains, NFTs, or DApps and make calculated investment-related decisions.

DefiLlama Forked Amid Internal Dispute

The developers of DefiLlama have recently forked the project due to a disagreement with the leadership. The move came after someone who allegedly controls DefiLlama’s Twitter, and domain name attempted to launch a token without the team’s approval.

On March 19, 0xngmi, a pseudonymous developer at DefiLlama, announced the news. 0xngmi said that DefiLlama was “undergoing a hostile takeover” and accused DefiLlama’s founders of launching a token without employee support.

“There is an ongoing attempt to launch a token that does not represent us. We don’t want to be associated with it,” 0xngmi said. “The person who controls both defillama’s Twitter and domain has decided to launch a token despite everybody in the team not wanting it.”

The person who controls both defillama’s twitter and domain has decided to launch a token despite everybody in the team not wanting it.

— 0xngmi (llamazip arc) (@0xngmi) March 19, 2023

The developer added that the DefiLlama team working on the project for the past three years has “decided to fork Defillama and start fresh on llama.fi.”

Tendeeno, another member of the DefiLlama team, confirmed the fork in another Tweet. “Long story short, there was someone planning to launch a LLAMA token without approval of a single person on the defillama team,” they said.

Meanwhile, some in the crypto community have supported DefiLlama co-founders Charlie Watkins and Ben Hauser. For one, DeFi architect and Yearn.finance founder Andre Cronje argued that the token launch was a legitimate effort by the founders to raise funds to keep the operation going. He said:

“Easy to be ideological when you aren’t paying the bills. Charlie has been out of pocket funding all of defillamas expenses for years, it isn’t cheap. Watching everyone turn on everything he has done is disgusting. Him trying to stop the bleeding isn’t greed, it’s sustainability. Let’s see how long they last without his “free money”. They’ll be raising or adding ads or a token soon enough.”

However, other Twitter users noted that the founders could have handled the situation better instead of trying to abuse their power as the domain owner. Some also mentioned that the team could have considered other monetization methods, including subscriptions and ads.

He could have handled the situation in a different way and not abuse his power as the owner of the domain to impose his position. He’s acting as the owner of DL and there is a team that also invested time and effort to make DL successful

— AnonBuilder (, ) (@anonbuilderok) March 19, 2023

Notably, both sites (DefiLlama and Llama.fi) are live and provide the same dashboard.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist

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