DL News is closing.
We launched in 2022 as the news arm of DefiLlama, the crypto data platform beloved by much of the industry. Our founders had spent years in crypto and were frustrated by the state of crypto journalism. They wanted something that avoided both the sneering condescension of mainstream coverage and the relentless shilling that had infected so much of crypto media itself.
Unlike DefiLlama, however, DL News was never conceived as a public good. It was supposed to become a real, profitable business.
Welp. That did not happen.
We began work on DL News before Elon Musk bought Twitter, before AI transformed publishing, and during a very different moment for digital media. In those early days, people around us talked constantly about building the “Bloomberg of crypto.”
But a major internal conflict at DefiLlama in early 2023 left us effectively separated from the company we were built alongside. For the next two years, communication between the organisations was minimal. We remained tied to the DefiLlama name and identity, but without meaningful operational alignment or access to its much larger distribution.
At the same time, the media environment deteriorated rapidly. We realised relatively early that a traditional subscription model would not sustain the business, and in 2024 we launched DL Research as our commercial arm. That effort succeeded beyond what many thought possible. In 2025, revenue grew 270% and we crossed seven figures in annual sales, building a client base that included some of the biggest names in crypto. We began to collaborate meaningfully with our sister company.
I remain deeply impressed by what our research team accomplished. They built a serious revenue engine from scratch in one of the most competitive – some might say hostile – markets imaginable.
But it was not enough to offset the broader pressures bearing down on DL News. Traffic across crypto and tech media contracted severely. AI accelerated the collapse of search distribution and enabled endless waves of parasitic aggregation. Our journalism remained excellent, but fewer people were seeing it on our site, and commercial viability became increasingly difficult without meaningful audience scale.
By mid-April, it became increasingly clear that we were out of time. We started lay-offs, and on May 1, informed staff that DL News would close at the end of the month.
Amidst the disappointment, I keep returning to how special this team is. We broke major stories. We showed up where others didn’t. We angered powerful people often enough that legal threats became almost routine. I have never been prouder than when those threats arrived (also, frightened) because they meant our journalists had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
We were scrappy underdogs, and like most underdogs, we did not win. But the work was great, and it mattered. And if anyone reading this is hiring, I can say without hesitation that you will not find a smarter, kinder, funnier, or more talented team than the people leaving DL News. I will miss them all very much.
