DefiLlama put its mobile app on ice for months. The reason: knockoff apps impersonating the brand kept showing up on Apple’s App Store, and the team refused to ship until every one was gone. The pseudonymous founder of the analytics platform made the call public Saturday.
0xngmi wrote on X that the team waited “till all the fake apps were taken down before we launched ours to avoid any user getting scammed.” One of those apps proved especially stubborn. In a follow-up post he said Apple removed it “in days,” but only after the DefiLlama team downloaded it themselves and recorded it siphoning funds from a small crypto wallet.
The drained amount is not named. Neither is the wallet holder nor the app’s developer. Months of takedown requests had gone nowhere, per the account, until the team resorted to proving the theft with their own evidence.
Cointelegraph says it approached Apple for comment. No response was reported.
App Store impersonation is hardly new. Fake apps dressed up as crypto brands have surfaced on Apple’s storefront repeatedly. A fake Rabby wallet app stayed listed even after users were drained, Cointelegraph reported. A fake Curve Finance app appeared on the App Store in 2024. And in November 2023 a counterfeit Ledger Live app on the Microsoft Store drove roughly $588,000 in losses across 38 transactions.
That $588,000 is the only hard loss figure in the current story. The DefiLlama case offers less to go on. The victim is described only as “a small crypto wallet.” No count of impersonating apps was given, and no names. 0xngmi referred to “all the fake apps” in the plural without specifying how many.
The timeline is the telling part. Months of reports produced nothing, per 0xngmi. Then the team showed a wallet being drained in real time, and Apple acted within days. The sequence suggests App Store enforcement moves faster on demonstrated harm than on brand-impersonation reports alone. Apple has not publicly stated its reasoning, and the company had not responded to Cointelegraph’s request for comment at press time.
What we don’t know: the exact amount drained, the number or names of the fake apps, the dates of discovery and removal, and whether the victim has been identified. The mechanics of how the malicious app drained the wallet are not described in the reporting.
Holders, as ever, are divided.
DefiLlama is a free on-chain analytics tool. A mobile app from the team would be a first-party companion to its browser dashboard. No launch date for the legitimate app has been announced. 0xngmi framed the delay as a choice to clear the store of fakes first.
