Legion & Cookie3: Evolution of Onchain Fundraising

**Matt O'Connor** (0:01)
You're now plugged in to The Delphi Podcast.

**José Maria Macedo** (0:09)
Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Delphi Podcast. I'm José Maria Macedo. I head up Delphi Labs, and today I'll be co-hosting an episode I'm really excited about with Mati from Legion, a project that we incubated at Labs and that just announced their big round, and Filip from Cookie, Cookie3, who's been working together really closely with Legion to build what they're calling Attention Capital Markets. So, first of all, congrats, Mati, on the round, huge, huge win bringing in the big TradFi names, Brevan Howard and VanEck. It feels like yesterday that we were kind of brainstorming on this in Portugal, like whatever it was two years ago. So it's awesome to see how far you guys have come and how you've executed on it. So maybe as we start, you could just intro yourselves and talk about Legion and Cookie3 separately and then we can go into the ACM vision.

**Matt O'Connor** (1:09)
Cool. Thanks for having us, José. Maybe I'll dive in and happy to hand it off to Filip. On my side, super brief personal background, TradFi background, data scientist, machine learning. Started getting into crypto in 2016, 2017 ICO craze originally. I've been in full time in the industry, the last four years or so, and with that lens came into the space in parameter optimization, token design type of roles. So kept seeing founders make dumb decisions about distributing their token. So started thinking about how is there a way we can align incentives, get back to some of the elements of 2017, get smarter, more data-driven token distributions. That led me to meeting Fab, Fabrizio, my co-founder, right, and the Delphi guys, and just brainstorming around these concepts, as you mentioned, José, that was coming up on two years ago. And obviously now we've just announced our seed round raise from VanEck and Brevan Howard Digital, and also married that with some of the exchanges and some of the more native DeFi players, Coinbase Ventures, Kraken, crypto.com, Bitscale, Blockchain Builders Fund, etc.
So we're super excited. We see kind of the future of IPOs, right? The stock market and ICOs as being one of the same thing. And that's ultimately what the world that we're building for is when community formation, capital formation, onchain fundraising is all happening onchain, right? Instead of these, instead of these legacy type of systems that we've seen today. For that to happen, obviously, there's a regulatory piece that needs to evolve, which we're participating in. But there's also a bunch of incentives and mechanisms that need to be improved. And that speaks a lot to what we've done with Cookie on the Attention Capital Market side.

**José Maria Macedo** (2:59)
Filip, go ahead, give us an intro to Cookie3 as well. And also just your quick background.

**Filip Wielanier** (3:05)
Of course. Yeah. Thank you, Joseph. And congrats, Mati, as well. Big deal with the recent round. So I'm CEO and co-founder of Cookie3. In terms of my background, I'm coming from a marketing and data side of things, both professionally and I was studying that both fields. So I was working mainly in marketing startups and Deloitte Digital, implementing different solutions into financial stratify systems, involved in crypto from the investment side of things since late 2017, since late 2021, building Cookie3. So we were coming up with Cookie3 at the very beginning from the pretty straightforward goal to track the capital attribution in Web3, which was and still is quite challenging. Because as in Web2, we have pretty battle-tested ways of doing so. We have only off-chain data, so we can do some referral links. We can do some UTM links. We can measure specifically in local systems, what kind of conversions are happening in terms of them.

**José Maria Macedo** (4:29)
What do you mean by capital attribution exactly?

**Filip Wielanier** (4:33)
Yeah. Basically, in Web2, you can measure the attribution itself by using known solutions like Google Analytics, for example, or any other analytics provider that is actually measuring the flow and the conversions of your user base, and then retention, churn rate, but it's only limited to your local system, where you are actually integrating it in a limited environment. Whereas in Web3, we have this on-chain data, on-chain work where we have open ledgers of public blockchains, which are plenty of them. Basically, you cannot measure everything within your internal system, but you have to actually take into account what's going on outside of it on the blockchain, simply. And this is why we came up with solving that by merging these two words of off-chain data coming from in-platform data, from social data with on-chain data. Because you cannot live without any of those words if you are running a company in Web3, because you are simply providing... You have your own website and platform, you have your own social media, but on the other hand, you have your own protocol that is running on-chain. So you have to actually merge those two words in terms of understanding what's going on in terms of user-based funnel. So this is what was like initially as a goal. And actually, right now with ACM, it correlates a lot because we found out that actually it's still not solved in terms of measuring the capital influence of the creators. So along the way, we came to the point where we are already providing very sophisticated solutions for measuring attribution within Web3 protocols. But then we also came up with a few solutions of actually activizing creators to actually provide the value in terms of creating quality, insightful content about specific projects that are incentivizing those creators. So we are kind of an oracle that is providing scores and points based on the value that is provided by the specific creators. And this is quite challenging.