0% read
Last updated:
Fabrizio Giabardo
Fabrizio Giabardo is the co-founder of Legion, a merit-based cryptocurrency fundraising platform he started with Matt O'Connor.[1][2] Trained in geology and computer science at Monash University, he worked as an exploration geologist, a web developer, and an experience designer across Australia and the United Kingdom before moving into consulting and then into the cryptocurrency industry, which he began exploring in 2020.[2]
Early Life and Education
Giabardo studied at Monash University in Australia between 2011 and 2015, completing a combined Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Computer Science with majors in geology/earth science and computer science.[4][1] In October 2014 he received an award for highest academic performance at Monash, presented to students who obtained the top mark in level one to three science coursework units offered in the second semester of 2014 where enrolment was fifteen students or more.[4]
During and shortly after his studies he took on a range of roles at Monash and other Australian institutions, including a service desk coordinator position at Monash University, a web developer role at CSIRO between 2014 and 2015, and participation in PwC Australia's 2014 Technology Academy Program and 2015 Sport Manager Leadership Program.[4] At CSIRO he worked on publishing vocabularies through application programming interfaces (APIs), building standard web APIs for accessing vocabulary content and creating browser-based visualisations of environmental vocabularies using JavaScript, HTML5, CSS, SVG, and D3, including demonstrators built over SPARQL endpoints.[4]
Career
Giabardo's career spans geology, software and experience design, management consulting, and the cryptocurrency industry. He has described beginning his career in consulting before moving into startups, where he says he built a foundation across product development, technology, and strategy, and later founding a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol that gave him direct experience of building in Web3.[5]
Geology and Design
In 2015 Giabardo worked as an exploration geologist for Jervois Mining Ltd in the Cobar Basin of New South Wales, where his activities included RAB (rotary air blast) drill logging, chip tray construction, laterite nickel and cobalt prospect exploration, and basic mapping and cross-section extrapolation.[4] From 2016 he worked as an experience design consultant at Deloitte Digital in Melbourne, where his responsibilities covered customer research and synthesis, facilitation of client workshops, and the design and delivery of service blueprints and customer journeys.[4] In the same period he co-founded Surf Sheep, a Facebook chatbot startup providing surf forecasts, reports, and notifications.[4]
Giabardo subsequently moved into service and experience design work in London. Through the agency Candyspace he worked as a freelance service/experience designer on a Rolls-Royce digital transformation project in the aviation industry, designing a service and system intended to deliver operational and design benefits.[4] He also held freelance design engagements with Publicis Sapient and Interbrand, and at Ourchestra he worked with a two-person team on a "systems thinking exercise" mapping the complex system of climate change to identify where a social enterprise could have maximum impact.[4] As a freelance strategic designer at Future State Design Ltd between 2018 and 2020, he specialised in assessing end-to-end customer experience, design thinking, prototyping, journey mapping, and testing assumptions.[4] He later served as head of design and head of customer experience at SiSU Health, an Australian wellness and fitness services company founded in 2013 that works on lifestyle-related diseases.[4]
Entry into Cryptocurrency
Giabardo began exploring cryptocurrency in 2020 and eventually worked with the crypto analytics and research platform Delphi Digital.[2] From January 2022 he served as a director at Future Chain Labs, a software development company founded in 2022 and headquartered in Singapore; in a February 2023 post he announced leaving the health-tech space to take the director role, and in mid-2023 he described the team growing from one to nine members and landing in Lisbon for a two-month hacker house.[4] This DeFi venture gave him the Web3 building experience that preceded Legion.[5]
At Delphi Digital he held the role of project lead with Delphi Labs from January 2023 to December 2025.[4][1] Delphi Digital, a research services company headquartered in Miami Beach, Florida, became an early partner of Legion.[4]
Legion
Legion is a merit-based cryptocurrency fundraising platform that Giabardo co-founded with Matt O'Connor to bridge traditional finance and blockchain technology, with a focus on regulatory compliance, investor accountability, and transparency.[4] The company enables startups to raise capital through token offerings compliant with the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework, and it is structured to give retail investors access to on-chain fundraising.[4] Projects using the platform can customise allocation, whitelists, and discounts based on on-chain and off-chain criteria about each user, allowing issuers to assemble what Giabardo calls "an organic community of die-hard supporters."[4] Giabardo's co-founder Matt O'Connor leads regulation and policy at the company, previously led token economics at Status, and authored an open-source book titled Tokenomics for Builders that has been reviewed by founders and investors associated with Monad, Placeholder, Tensor, AllianceDAO, and Galaxy Digital.[3][6]
Giabardo has given overlapping founding dates for his Legion roles across profiles. He lists the main entity, "Legion | Merit-based Fundraising," as beginning in January 2023 from Malta, and a separate entity, "Legion | Early stage investments," founded in 2026.[4] Crunchbase records two concurrent founder positions at Legion, dated October 2023 and November 2025.[1] Legion is described as a blockchain services company with a distributed workforce across twelve countries, including Australia, the United States, the Netherlands, Malta, and Poland, and is registered in Road Town in the British Virgin Islands.[4]
Products
Giabardo describes Legion as running two product lines. Legion Crypto is an underwriting and token distribution platform that he reports has processed more than $450 million through smart contracts, with distribution through exchange partners including Kraken and Crypto.com.[3] He positions it against launchpads and token-sale platforms that he says "compete on access and hype" rather than on underwriting.[3] Legion Equity, which he described as newly launched with a first set of top emerging and solo managers onboarded, is a two-sided general partner/limited partner (GP/LP) marketplace connecting solo and emerging fund managers with vetted LPs; it includes onboarding, a trust and vouch layer between participants, and a content programme that lets managers present their story to allocators.[3]
Giabardo frames the company's core customer problem as raising capital being "slow, opaque, relationship-gated, and expensive," with existing intermediaries poorly suited to managers operating below the mega-fund tier.[3] He states that Legion's distinguishing feature is combining underwriting and distribution in one place, backed by a trust layer and by partners — exchanges, allocators, and the company's own cap table — that give both sides reason to believe the quality bar is genuine.[3] He describes institutional use cases in which exchanges and platforms can offer users access to underwritten primary issuance without building their own diligence, compliance, and smart-contract infrastructure, and in which a private bank or wealth platform can supply LP capital and client relationships while Legion Equity supplies vetted managers, onboarding, and content.[3] Giabardo has stated the company serves two sides of the capital formation market — fund managers and token issuers on one side, and vetted LPs seeking early-stage access on the other — and that he is motivated by expanding equitable access to early-stage opportunities.[3]
Giabardo reports that Legion has attracted more than $450 million in token sale demand and over 350,000 users.[4] The company has summarised its own positioning as combining algorithmic expertise with institutional-grade regulatory credibility.[3]
Funding and Backers
In August 2025 Legion announced a $5 million seed round led by VanEck and Brevan Howard Digital, with participation from the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken and the venture arms of Coinbase and Crypto.com, among other investors.[2] The round combined equity with token warrants, which Giabardo and O'Connor described as promised allocations of a yet-to-be-launched cryptocurrency; the founders declined to disclose the company's valuation.[2] Giabardo first announced that Legion had closed a seed round and was coming out of stealth in August 2024, thanking Delphi Digital as partners and describing the company's mission as reinventing "blockchain's killer use case: capital formation on a global scale."[4]
Giabardo lists Legion's backers as including VanEck, Brevan Howard, Kraken, Coinbase Ventures, GSR, Cyber Fund, Delphi Digital, AllianceDAO, and Delphi, along with angel investors such as Mike Dudas of The Block, Alex Svanevik of Nansen, Bobby Ong of CoinGecko, and Peter Smith of Blockchain.com.[4][3]
Regulatory Engagement
Legion is built to comply with the MiCA framework for early token launches, which requires projects to publish a white paper detailing risks and to update it when material changes occur.[2] Giabardo and O'Connor travelled to Washington, D.C., to meet with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to discuss what disclosures the agency should require for public token sales.[2] Giabardo summarised the company's ambition to Fortune as "IPO-type rigor, IPO-type access, mixing in with, again, crypto rails."[2] For regulatory guidance he has recommended the primary MiCA texts and Central Bank of Ireland guidance, and has cited Delphi Digital's research as strong on market structure.[3]
Awards and Recognition
Giabardo won the Solana category of the Chainlink Fall Hackathon 2021, issued by Chainlink in November 2021.[4] His design work in London earned a 2019 D&AD Awards shortlisting, recorded in July 2019.[4] Earlier, in November 2016, he was part of the winning team at Startup Weekend Melbourne RetailTech, an event backed by Google for Entrepreneurs, York Butter Factory, and the City of Melbourne.[4]
Interviews
Token Fundraising and Investor Selection #01
In an interview with Alex Kehaya on The Index Podcast, published on February 17, 2026, Fabrizio Giabardo, co-founder of Legion, discussed access to early-stage cryptocurrency investments and the structure of token fundraising. He attributed disparities in access to private funding rounds, differences in industry connections, and unequal access to project information to challenges faced by individual investors. He also discussed changes in cryptocurrency fundraising following the initial coin offering (ICO) cycles of 2017 and 2018, including the increased role of venture capital firms in financing projects before public token launches.
Giabardo described Legion’s fundraising process, which incorporates on-chain activity, social media profiles, developer contributions, and other information into a reputation assessment known as the Legion Score. Applicants can also provide additional information about their interests and intended involvement in a project. According to Giabardo, project founders use these inputs to assess applicants and determine token allocations according to project-specific criteria. The process includes application reviews and measures intended to identify fraudulent accounts and coordinated attempts to obtain multiple allocations.
The discussion also covered token generation events (TGEs), exchange listing costs, token valuations, and the distribution of token ownership. Giabardo identified high valuations, large allocations to individual investors, and the sale of tokens to generate project treasury funds as issues that can affect token launches. He described Legion’s role in evaluating fundraising plans, reviewing exchange and market-making arrangements, and coordinating with trading platforms, including Kraken. He also stated that the platform seeks to distribute tokens among participants whose interests and activities correspond to the objectives of each project.
Giabardo further discussed information asymmetry and the role of disclosure requirements in cryptocurrency fundraising. He argued that access to project information and the ability to conduct due diligence are relevant to investment decisions, regardless of whether funding comes from retail investors or venture capital firms. He also identified regulatory developments in Europe and the United States as areas relevant to future fundraising practices, particularly concerning disclosure obligations and the use of blockchain infrastructure beyond cryptocurrency-focused projects. [7]
LEGION and Alternative Models for Token Fundraising #02
On August 22, 2025, Bitcoin Magazine NL published an interview with Fabrizio Giabardo, co-founder of LEGION, on its YouTube channel. Hosted by Raul Gavira, the discussion examined early access to initial coin offerings (ICOs), pre-token sales, and investor selection in cryptocurrency fundraising.
Giabardo described limitations in existing token fundraising practices, particularly the concentration of investment opportunities among venture capital firms and selected investors. He explained that LEGION uses a scoring system to evaluate prospective participants according to criteria such as expertise, community involvement, professional networks, and other contributions in addition to financial investment. The system is designed to help projects select participants according to their individual requirements.
The interview also addressed project evaluation, security audits, transparency, and regulatory compliance in token sales. Giabardo discussed the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) and the development of regulatory frameworks governing digital assets. He argued that greater regulatory clarity could support the use of token sales as a fundraising method and expand participation beyond traditional venture capital networks. [8]
See something wrong?
