Recently, there has been an increasing number of news about the public sale of crypto projects. It is worth noting that these crypto projects have not chosen the early IC0 platform Coinlsit as the sales platform, but have turned to the new generation of IC0 platforms that have quietly emerged, such as Echo, Legion, and Buidlpad, and these platforms have already established influence in the overseas crypto community.
Well-known crypto projects such as Ethena, Usual, Monad, Initia, MegaETH, Fuel, and Solayer have all raised funds through these platforms to the community. Many overseas crypto community users frankly admit that participating in the financing activities of these emerging IC0 platforms has become their main way to obtain returns.
On January 18, the IC0 platform Buidlpad established by the former Binance executive completed the public sale of its first project Solayer (LAYER), ultimately raising $57.3 million, 545.24% more than the original plan of $10.5 million.
On January 13, Echo platform founder Cobie revealed an interesting phenomenon: some VCs are putting pressure on crypto projects in an attempt to prevent them from offering discounts or conducting community sales through platforms like Echo. In response, the IC0 platform Legion incubated by Delphi Labs expressed resonance and confirmed that there are indeed cases of VCs preventing projects from conducting public offerings.
Although VCs are trying to resist crypto projects participating in IC0, this precisely reflects that these IC0 platforms have already gained a certain influence and have occupied an important position in the minds of crypto projects and the community. For a long time, the crypto community has been plagued by the "high valuation, high FDV, low liquidity" VC coins, but these platforms provide users with early opportunities to participate in projects.
On the same day, Buidlpad stated that due to the large number of registered users participating in the Solayer public sale, its website was forced to close the KYC process, causing it to be in a state of paralysis and having to postpone the sale time.
All of this seems to herald the dawn of a revival in the crypto IC0 field.
The 'Public Offering Private Sale' Echo Crypto Angel Investor Community Alliance
Echo is a crypto financing platform established by crypto KOL@Cobie. Cobie, whose real name is Jordan Fish, joined Lido in 2021 to be responsible for TVL growth, and is seen by the community as a co-founder, as well as the initiator of the Web3 Podcast program UpOnly, who has interviewed many big names in the crypto circle such as Vitalik Buterin, Michael Saylor, and Mark Cuban, and has been extremely popular.
In March 2024, Cobie announced the release of the Echo platform's beta version and completed the first financing transaction: Ethena raised $300,000 through Echo.
Unlike the previous large-scale public offering IC0 platforms (such as Coinlist), Echo is not an open fundraising platform for retail investors, but more like a crypto investor community alliance. On the Echo platform, supporting users can establish their own investment community as lead investors, and share their investments with the group members to invest together, and then the lead investors can extract a certain percentage of the investment returns.
The working mechanism of Echo's product is similar to the joint investment product Syndicates launched by the US startup fundraising platform AngelList, aiming to allow individual angel investors to raise funds like VCs finding LPs, and then get a certain percentage of the investment returns, allowing those investors with less money but more resources to have the opportunity to play the role of VCs. Therefore, Echo is also known as a crypto angel joint investment platform.
The early financing amounts on Echo are usually concentrated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the number of participating investors is also mostly around dozens, more suitable for the angel round and VC financing stages of early projects.
Currently, users who want to use the Echo platform to invest in projects need to go through KYC processes such as email, wallet, and X account.
It is worth noting that the project fundraising on Echo is all private sales, without disclosing any details, without marketing or promotion, and only qualified investors can see the transactions. Investing users need to join the group established by the lead investor to obtain fundraising information, and those who want to become lead investors generally need to be invited by Echo, and well-known figures in the crypto industry are more likely to be invited.
It is reported that CEOs like Larry Cermak of The Block and Aave founder Marc Zeller have already established their own Echo communities, and users who want to join not only need to be tested, but also need to meet certain conditions to obtain specific investment opportunities within the group.
Since its launch, more than 30 crypto projects have raised funds through Echo, including well-known projects such as Ethena, Morph, Usual, Hyperlane, OneBalance, Wildcat, Sphere, Dawn, Derive, Monad, Initia, and MegaETH. On January 17, the decentralized trading platform GTE_XYZ also raised $2.5 million through the Echo platform.
Among them, the $10 million financing of MegaETH through the Echo platform in December has attracted the most attention from the crypto community. According to an interview with MegaETH co-founder Shuyao Kong, MegaETH's first fundraising on Echo reached the $4.2 million target in just 56 seconds, and then the project decided to raise an additional $5.8 million on Echo, which was completed in 75 seconds.
According to Dune's statistics, as of January 17, the total financing amount completed on the Echo platform has reached $66.6 million, with 6,104 investing users, and 177 financing transactions of more than $5,000. The average financing amount per transaction is around $360,000, with an average of 130 participants per transaction, and an average investment amount of $3,130 per user.
According to the publicly available investment project information, a member of the crypto community summarized that the lead investor recommendation mechanism and profit-sharing model of Echo democratize trustworthy investment, and the platform tends to support high-potential projects favored by the crypto elite circle.
Legion, an investment alliance of crypto KOLs incubated by Delphi Labs
Legion is an on-chain ICO platform incubated by crypto venture capital firm Delphi Labs, aiming to build a reputation system for investors to allow projects to determine the amount of investment and discount benefits to be allocated to investors. The platform announced the completion of a $2 million seed round financing in August 2024, led by Cyber Fund, with participation from AllianceDAO, Delphi Labs, LongHash, and others.
The specific implementation is that Legion provides an aggregated on-chain and off-chain reputation system called Legion Scores, which assigns a Legion score to each user on the platform to reflect their value and capabilities in various aspects.
After registering on the Legion platform, users can connect their social media accounts, wallet addresses, and submit personal capability data or resources they can provide to projects, and then they will be assigned a score. Currently, the specific score assessment of Legion depends on the user's data in the four aspects of "social media influence, development experience, on-chain interaction experience, investment history and appreciation experience".
Through the Legion score, investors can prove their past trading capabilities and data status, and the project side can customize the financing requirements based on the project needs, using the on-chain and off-chain standards of each investor to define the allocation, whitelist, and discounts, only allowing specific investor groups to participate, such as choosing users with large social media influence and resources and capabilities as the initial investment participants, who are also the initial members of the project community. If a user is allocated but does not invest, their investor score will be lowered.
According to users in the investment community, Legion tends to favor KOLs with a large fan base. Therefore, Legion is also seen as a crypto KOL investment alliance.
On January 15, Legion's official social media X account stated that in the six months since its launch, the Legion platform has completed fundraising for 5 crypto projects, including: modular L2 network Fuel, DePin network Pulse, DePIN project Silencio, privacy computing Enclave, and AI Agent platform Almanak.
Among them, Fuel was listed on the Bitget exchange on December 14, and after the listing, it once surged to $8, with a return of over 27 times for investors through Legion. It is the blessing effect of Fuel that has brought Legion into the crypto community.
Buidlpad, a public fundraising platform established by a former Binance executive
Buidlpad is an ICO platform established by Erick Zhang, the managing partner of Nomad Capital, who was previously the head of the Binance Research Institute and in charge of the Lanuchpad platform. In December 2024, Buidlpad announced the launch of a crypto public fundraising platform for KYC-compliant users in non-restricted regions.
On January 10, Buidlpad announced that the Solana ecosystem's re-staking protocol Solayer will conduct a public sale of LAYER tokens on the platform on January 13, which is the first public sale on the Buidlpad platform since its launch.
However, on January 13, Buidlpad stated that due to the large number of registered participants on the platform (15 times higher than expected), the Solayer subscription start time has been postponed to January 16.
According to the disclosed information, Solayer plans to raise $10.5 million with a valuation of $35 million, offering 30 million tokens at a price of about $0.35 per token. In addition to the whitelist being able to purchase up to $5,000 worth of SOL, the rest of the participants need a minimum purchase of $50 worth of SOL, and the maximum is only $2,000 worth of SOL.
On January 18, the Solayer (LAYER) public sale ended, with a final fundraising of $57.3 million, 545.24% more than the original plan of $10.5 million.
Similarly, users need to pass KYC certification to use the Buidlpad platform.
However, compared to financing platforms like Echo and Legion, the Buidlpad platform is more open to users, suitable for qualified mainstream players, and more like the previous ICO targeting the general public.
