Road Town, British Virgin Islands, August 27, 2024, Chainwire
Legion plans to become one of the first MiCA-compliant CASPs and provide access to early fundraising and token offerings to non-accredited investors.
Today, Legion emerges to mark a new era in merit-based on-chain fundraising.
According to the team, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) revolutionized the way blockchain projects raise funds. They offered equal opportunities to participate in the early stages of new projects and, as a result, created some of the strongest communities the crypto world has ever seen, such as LINKMarines, ThorChads, and ETH maxis.
“I participated in half a dozen ICOs. I loved them, but it was clear they were flawed. Scams, bots, and regulatory crackdowns killed on-chain fundraising. Now, price discovery happens in backroom deals. Investment potential is extracted entirely off-chain, before regular users have access. These private marketplaces stand in stark contrast to the decentralized ethos of crypto and leave projects well-funded but without any organic community.” – Matt O'Connor, co-founder of Legion
Legion exists for one purpose: to provide equal opportunity access to on-chain fundraising for new cryptocurrency projects. It accomplishes this mission with its investor reputation and accountability layer, as well as by providing the regulatory clarity offered by the latest regulations. Together, these features ensure that for teams using Legion, the risk-reward ratio of on-chain retail user fundraising is competitive with that of venture capital fundraising.
Legion’s founding team is no stranger to on-chain fundraising, having worked on multiple ICO-funded projects, including current and former Top 50 projects by market cap such as Stacks, “the first SEC-qualified cryptocurrency.” [token] “offer in American history.”
“Raising funds from retail investors on-chain is the best way to build an incentive-aligned community, but it can be risky because you don’t know who the early investors are. Will they be long-term supporters? Are they real or just bots attacking? Legion’s accountability layer allows teams to assemble their retail army based on on- and off-chain criteria, and reduce the reputation of short-term actors. It changes the incentives and aligns everyone to act for the long term.” – Fabrizio Giabardo, Legion Co-Founder
Legion is backed by several mission-driven founders, accelerators, and previous angel investors, completing a $2M seed 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.
“In projects, it’s all about maximizing the amount of value per dollar raised. Raising funds from the right mix of retail and venture capital investors is crucial for the right community. Just as the first ten employees define the company culture, the first 100-1000 token holders define the community culture.” – Konstantin Lomashuk, Managing Partner at Cyber and former Co-Founder of Lido
With this latest round, Legion is building out its reputation system and accountability layer, and securing the necessary VASP/CASP licenses to facilitate pre-token fundraising rounds and token sales to non-accredited investors under MiCA.
About Legion
Legion makes investing in on-chain fundraising accessible to retail investors through regulatory compliance and investor accountability. Projects using Legion can customize allocation, whitelisting, discounts, and more using on-chain and off-chain criteria on a per-investor basis, creating an organic and loyal community of supporters. Each Legion user is assigned a Legion Score, as well as sub-component and achievement scores, reflecting their ability to add value across multiple facets and greatly reduce bot and Sybil activity. These reputation scores change based on how investors support the projects they invest in, disincentivizing short-term value-extracting type behaviors.
For more information on Legion and the user's Legion Score:
X | Remote reader | Website
ContactCo-founderMatt O'ConnorLegion[email protected]
This article was originally published on Chainwire
