Road Town, British Virgin Islands, August 27, 2024, Chainwire
Legion plans to become one of the first MiCA-compliant CASPs and offer access to early-stage fundraising and token offerings to non-accredited investors.
Today, Legion emerges to mark a new era of merit-based blockchain fundraising.
According to the team, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) have revolutionized the way blockchain projects raise funds. They have provided equal opportunities to participate in the early stages of new projects and have created some of the strongest communities crypto has ever seen, such as LINKMarines, ThorChads, and ETH maxis.
“I’ve participated in half a dozen ICOs. I loved them, but it was clear they had flaws. Scams, bots, and a regulatory crackdown killed on-chain fundraising. Now, price discovery happens in back-channel transactions. The upside is entirely mined off-chain, before ordinary users have access to it. These private markets stand in stark contrast to the decentralized ethos of cryptocurrencies and leave projects well-funded but without any organic community.” – Matt O’Connor, co-founder of Legion
Legion exists for a single purpose: to provide equal access to on-chain fundraising for new cryptocurrency projects. It accomplishes this mission through its investor reputation and accountability layer, as well as by providing the regulatory clarity afforded by the latest regulations. Together, these features ensure that for teams using Legion, the risk/reward ratio of raising funds from retail users on-chain is competitive with that of raising funds from VCs.
Legion’s founding team is no stranger to on-chain fundraising, having worked on several ICO-funded projects — including current and former Top 50 projects by market cap such as Stacks, “the first SEC-qualified (token) offering in U.S. history.”
“Raising funds from retail investors on-chain is the best way to build an incentive-driven community, but it can be risky because you don’t know who your early investors are. Will they be long-term supporters? Are they real or just sniper bots? Legion’s accountability layer allows teams to build their retail army based on on-chain and off-chain criteria, and reduce the reputation of actors in the short term. This changes incentives and aligns everyone to act for the long term.” – Fabrizio Giabardo, Legion Co-Founder
Legion is backed by a number of alumni founders, accelerators, and mission-driven angels, completing a $2 million funding round led by Cyber Fund, with participation from AllianceDAO, Delphi Labs, CoinGecko, Mike Dudas, Alex Svanevik, Peter Smith, Maggie Love, Jon Wu, Ryan Watkins, LongHash, and others.
“For projects, it’s about maximizing value per dollar raised. Raising money from the right mix of retail and venture capital for the right community is critical. Just like your first ten employees define your company culture, your first 100-1,000 token holders define your community culture.” – Konstantin Lomashuk, Managing Partner at Cyber and former co-founder of Lido
With this latest round, Legion is building its reputation system and accountability layer, and securing the VASP/CASP licenses needed to facilitate pre-token fundraising rounds and token sales for non-accredited investors under MiCA.
About the Legion
Legion makes investing in on-chain fundraising accessible to retail investors with regulatory compliance and investor accountability. Projects using Legion can customize allocation, whitelisting, discounts, and more using on-chain and off-chain criteria for each investor, building an organic and die-hard community of supporters. Each Legion user is assigned a Legion Score, along with subcomponent scores and achievements, reflecting their ability to add value across multiple facets and significantly reduce bot and Sybil activity. These reputation scores change based on how investors support the projects they invest in, discouraging short-term, value-extraction behavior.
To learn more about Legion and the Legion User Score:
X | Farcaster | Website
Contact
Co-founder
Matt O’Connor
Legion
hello@legion.cc
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