New Collaboration Democratizes the Early-Stage Fundraising Landscape for Arbitrum Community
Legion, the merit-based onchain fundraising platform aimed at reshaping early-stage crypto investment, today announced Arbitrum, the leading Ethereum Layer 2 network, as its preferred EVM network for all onchain activity. The platform leverages blockchain technology to provide a transparent and efficient way for projects to raise capital while ensuring investors can assess and support based on merit. By bringing its business to Arbitrum, its robust community will be able to invest in early-stage companies in a previously unprecedented manner.
Legion’s platform bridges prospective investors with innovative crypto projects aiming to cultivate dedicated communities through compliant, incentive-aligned investments, both before Token Generation Events (TGE) and during token launches. Leveraging the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), Legion provides a compliant framework for projects to secure funding, enabling retail investors to access early-stage opportunities alongside venture capitalists. By integrating MiCA regulations, Legion prioritizes legal protection while promoting community engagement and transparency.
Legion’s proprietary reputation system, Legion Score, allows investors to showcase their non-monetary contributions to projects, allowing founders to choose from a pool of value-driven investors. The score integrates metrics like social influence, development expertise, and project engagement, providing a comprehensive database where founders can identify investors who align with their values, missions, and objectives.
A.J. Warner, Chief Strategy Officer at Offchain Labs, original developers of Arbitrum, commented: “The crypto fundraising system is unbalanced – investment access is currently based on net wealth as opposed to merit, and many active members of the industry simply don’t have the capital to invest in projects they believe it. Legion is democratizing crypto fundraising with an innovative onchain reputation system that prioritizes compliant, community-involved fundraising, bringing more access to the people who are most responsible for driving the industry forward. We look forward to powering the next generation of start-ups directly on Arbitrum.”
“Legion gives retail investors access to early investments and public token sales, and helps teams assemble their army of value-add investors to support the project. By hosting sales on Arbitrum, teams build a presence on the L2 with the most liquidity and activity, further reinforcing the benefit of broadly distributing their token to a wide set of real users and reputation-screened investors,” added Matt O’Connor, cofounder of Legion.
By prioritizing merit, the focus from passive speculation to active community involvement serves as Legion’s approach seeks to revive the collaborative spirit of the early ICO boom. Projects gain committed communities rather than just large wallets, venture capitalists access high-quality deal flow, and retail investors enjoy early opportunities.
Legion is backed by a number of mission-driven previous founders, accelerators, and angels. It recently completed 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.
About Arbitrum Foundation
The Arbitrum Foundation, founded in March 2023, supports and grows the Arbitrum network and its community with secure scaling solutions for Ethereum. Arbitrum One—a leading Ethereum Layer-2 scaling solution initially developed by Offchain Labs—offers ultra-fast, low-cost transactions with security derived from Ethereum through Optimistic Rollup technology. Launched in August 2021, the Arbitrum One mainnet beta is EVM-compatible to the bytecode level and has 54%+ TVL in the L2 segment. 2000+ DeFi and NFT projects are live in the ecosystem to date. In August 2022, Arbitrum One upgraded to Nitro tech stack, enabling fraud proofs over the core engine of Geth compiled to WASM.
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.
