Legion Raises $2M for Merit-Based ICO Platform
[PRESS RELEASE – Road Town, British Virgin Islands, August 27th, 2024]
Legion plans to become one of the first MiCA-compliant CASPs and bring access to early fundraising and token offerings to non-accredited investors.
Today, Legion emerges to mark a new era of merit-based on-chain fundraising.
According to the team, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) revolutionized how blockchain projects fundraise. They offered equal opportunity to participate in the early stages of new projects, and as a result, created some of the strongest communities crypto has ever seen, such as the LINKMarines, ThorChads, and ETH maxis.
“I participated in half a dozen ICOs. I loved them, but it was clear they had flaws. Scams, bots, and a regulatory clampdown killed on-chain fundraising. Now price discovery occurs in back-room deals. Investment upside is fully extracted off-chain, before everyday users have access. These private markets stand in stark contrast to crypto’s decentralized ethos and leave projects well-funded, but without any organic community.” – Legion cofounder Matt O’Connor
Legion exists for a singular purpose: to provide equal opportunity access to on-chain fundraising for new crypto projects. It achieves this mission with its investor reputation and accountability layer, as well as by providing regulatory clarity offered by the latest regulations. Together, these features ensure that for teams using Legion, the risk-to-reward ratio of raising from retail users on-chain is competitive to that of raising from VCs.
Legion’s founding team are no strangers to on-chain fundraising, having worked for multiple projects funded by ICOs – including current and former Top 50 projects by market cap such as Stacks, “the first SEC-qualified [token] offering in U.S. history”.
“Raising 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 your early investors are. Will they be long-term supporters? Are they real or just sniping bots? Legion’s accountability layer allows teams to assemble their retail army based on on-chain and off-chain criteria, and slash the reputation of short-term actors. It changes the incentives, and aligns everyone to act long-term.” – Legion cofounder Fabrizio Giabardo
Legion is backed by a number of mission-driven previous founders, accelerators, and angels, 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.
“For projects, it’s all about maximizing the amount of value per dollar raised. Raising from the right mix of retail and venture capital investors is crucial for the right community. Just as your first ten employees define company culture, your first 100 -1,000 token holders define community culture.” – Cyber managing partner and former Lido cofounder Konstantin Lomashuk
With this latest round, Legion is building its reputation system and accountability layer, and securing the necessary VASP/CASP licenses to facilitate pre-token fundraising rounds and token sales for non-accredited investors under MiCA.
About Legion
Legion makes investing in on-chain fundraises accessible to retail investors through regulatory compliance and investor accountability. Projects using Legion can customize allocation, whitelist, discounts, and more using on-chain and off-chain criteria about each investor, assembling an organic, die-hard, community of supporters. Each user on Legion is assigned a Legion Score, as well as subcomponent scores and achievements, reflecting their ability to add-value across multiple facets and heavily reducing bot and Sybil activity. These reputation scores change based on how investors support the projects they invest in, disincentivizing short-term, value-extractive type behaviors.
To learn more about Legion and user’s Legion Score:
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