The traditional mechanics of capital formation have long been guarded by legacy gatekeepers, leaving solo managers and emerging token issuers to navigate a slow, relationship-gated, and prohibitively expensive landscape.
Enter Legion, a groundbreaking infrastructure bridging the gap between crypto-native innovation and traditional private markets. Founded by Fabrizio Giabardo and Matt O’Connor, Legion combines deep algorithmic expertise with institutional-grade regulatory credibility to democratize access to high-quality, early-stage opportunities.
Backed by industry titans like VanEck and Coinbase Ventures, this powerhouse duo is actively rewriting the rules of distribution and underwriting. Dive into our exclusive interview to discover how they are building a genuine, trust-backed marketplace for the future of finance.
1-Tell us about yourself / your co-founder(s).
I’m Fabrizio, Director and co-founder of Legion. I started Legion to fix the parts of capital formation that are structurally broken: who gets access to quality deals, how managers raise capital, and how value is distributed among issuers, intermediaries, and investors.
Prior to Legion, I founded a DeFi protocol and held roles across consulting at Deloitte, startups, and product development. I am deeply motivated by expanding equitable access to early-stage opportunities.
My co-founder, Matt O’Connor, leads regulation and policy. He is the former lead algorithmic engineer for Bridgewater Associates, tokenomics researcher for the Stacks Foundation, and token economics lead for Status. His open source book, Tokenomics for Builders, has been positively reviewed by founders and VCs from Monad, Placeholder, Tensor, AllianceDAO, Galaxy Digital, and more.
Between us we cover the two things this business lives or dies on: deal and distribution mechanics on one side, and regulatory credibility on the other.
We’re backed by VanEck, Coinbase Ventures, Brevan Howard Digital, GSR, Delphi Digital, and Cyber Fund.
2-Who are your target customers, and what problem / opportunity do you address for them?
We serve two sides of the capital formation market.
On the manager side, our core customers are solo and emerging fund managers and, separately, token issuers raising primary capital. These groups share a problem: raising is slow, opaque, relationship-gated, and expensive, and the existing intermediaries are not built for managers operating below the mega-fund tier.
On the capital side, we serve vetted LPs seeking access to early-stage deals in robotics, AI, defense, and more.
The opportunity is the gap between how much private and primary-market capital wants to find good managers and good deals, and how badly served both sides currently are by legacy distribution.
3-What is your product / solution? Who do you compete with, and what is your USP?
Legion runs two product lines.
Legion Crypto is an underwriting and token distribution platform. We’ve processed over $450M+ through smart contracts, with distribution through exchange partners including Kraken and Crypto.com.
Legion Equity is a two-sided GP/LP marketplace connecting solo and emerging managers with vetted LPs, with onboarding, a trust and vouch layer between participants, and a content programme that lets managers tell their story credibly to allocators.
On competition: in crypto we sit against launchpads and token-sale platforms, but most compete on access and hype rather than underwriting, which is exactly the gap we’re moving into. In equity we sit near fund-admin and placement tooling and emerging-manager networks, but those are mostly one-sided or service-heavy rather than a genuine two-sided marketplace with a trust graph.
Our USP is underwriting plus distribution in one place, backed by a trust layer and by partners (exchanges, allocators, and our cap table) that give both sides a reason to believe the quality bar is real.
4-How do you help scale financial services, and how can financial institutions partner with you?
We help institutions scale on three axes: new customers, new products, and new distribution.
New distribution: exchanges and platforms can offer their users access to underwritten primary issuance without building the diligence, compliance, and smart-contract infrastructure themselves. Our existing exchange integrations are the template here.
New products: institutions that want exposure to private markets or tokenized primary issuance can plug into structures we already operate rather than standing them up internally.
New customers: for allocators and fund-of-funds, Legion Equity is a sourcing channel into a vetted population of emerging managers they would otherwise spend enormous effort to find.
Example of a partnership shape: a private bank or wealth platform wants to give qualified clients access to emerging managers but can’t justify the internal cost of sourcing and vetting a long tail of solo GPs. They partner with Legion Equity as the sourcing and trust layer. We supply the vetted manager pipeline, onboarding, and the content that lets each manager tell their story credibly to allocators; the institution supplies LP capital and the client relationship. The result is a private-markets offering the institution couldn’t economically build alone, and a distribution path managers couldn’t otherwise reach.
5-What relevant industry trends or market shifts should we be watching?
A few worth tracking:
Tokenization of private and pre-IPO equity. Real-world-asset and tokenized-equity rails are moving from theory to live deals, including under exemptions like Reg S, which opens private issuance to broader, compliant distribution.
The structural underservicing of emerging and solo managers. Capital keeps concentrating into the largest funds while a long tail of high-quality emerging managers struggles to raise, creating a real marketplace opportunity on the allocation side.
Convergence of crypto-native and traditional capital-markets infrastructure, where the interesting builders are the ones bridging both rather than picking a side.
For resources, MiCA primary texts and Central Bank of Ireland guidance are worth a read on the regulatory side, and Delphi Digital’s research is strong on the market-structure side.
6-What is your current stage and traction, and how can our network help?
Legion Crypto has processed over $450M+ through smart contracts with established exchange distribution. Legion Equity has just been launched, with the first set of top emerging and solo managers onboarded.
Your network can help most with introductions to allocators and LPs for the equity marketplace. We’ve been heads down building the rails for how private markets operate today, and are excited to expand the offering.
Sign up at https://app.uselegion.com/auth/signup
7-What’s on your bookshelf or podcast app? Your favourite place for a coffee or a drink?
Outside Legion, I train Brazilian jiu-jitsu, surf when I can, and play chess. Given my love for surfing, I’ve recently re-read Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.
For coffee, I actually don’t drink it, but if you’re a matcha fan, Matcha 12 in NYC is a fantastic place for one.
Legion is a rare kind of company: one that has identified a structural flaw — not just a product gap — and built the infrastructure to actually fix it. With $450M already processed on the crypto side and a newly launched equity marketplace, Fabrizio and Matt are not waiting for the market to catch up. They’re building the rails first and letting the volume follow.
Whether you’re an allocator looking for emerging manager deal flow, an institution exploring private-market exposure, or simply watching how onchain and traditional finance converge in real time, Legion is a company worth watching closely — and a conversation worth continuing.