ICO's have been a crazy phenomenon this year.
Hearing that several millions of dollars, or even hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised for a specific project doesn't come as a surprise anymore.
But now, there's a new ICO that might break all records and once again become the new "largest ICO of all time".
Filecoin has just started their token sale today, August 10.
In the first HOUR, they managed to raise the tremendous amount of $200 million for their project.
That's not even everything: They already hosted a successful pre-sale that resulted in over $52 million last week.
And the ICO will continue for another 27 days - so we could almost be sure that Filecoin will make ICO history.
What is Filecoin ?
Filecoin aims to be a new, efficient solution for data storage, based on the decentralized network protocol IPFS.
The whole world relies on the internet, and on capturing and sending data - but the internet itself is centralized and can be shut down.
That's why Filecoin wants to provide a new, decentralized solution and offer a safe, fast and reliable option for data storage.
The project was first created in 2014, and after already releasing the IPFS technology, the Filecoin platform by Protocol Labs will now finally go public.
Mining Filecoin
Filecoin operates on a new type of blockchain called Proof-of-Spacetime, where blocks are created by miners who are storing data.
This unique concept makes it very attractive for anyone to "rent out" their hardware space and become a filecoin miner and get rewarded with tokens.
Filecoin is a decentralized storage network that turns cloud storage into an algorithmic market. The
market runs on a blockchain with a native protocol token (also called “Filecoin”), which miners earn
by providing storage to clients. Conversely, clients spend Filecoin hiring miners to store or distribute
data. As with Bitcoin, Filecoin miners compete to mine blocks with sizable rewards, but Filecoin mining
power is proportional to active storage, which directly provides a useful service to clients (unlike Bitcoin
mining, whose usefulness is limited to maintaining blockchain consensus). This creates a powerful incentive for miners to amass as much storage as they can, and rent it out to clients.
Filecoin ICO / SEC compliant
The ICO started today at 1PM P.T. .
After just 30 minutes, the Filecoin team already announced that they had collected a total of $252 million in investments, including the pre-sale.
The ICO was the first token sale on the platform CoinList, which is a joint project between startup platform AngelList and Protocol Labs, the developer of Filecoin.
The date of the ICO had actually been pushed back multiple times (I had planned to write this post about filecoin 4 times already, only to check back on their website and see it postponed everytime!) but finally started today.
This ICO had very strict rules for investors, in order to be SEC compliant.
This means that they're trying to stay within legal guidelines recently proposed in the US. Basically, since ICO's have been very hyped this year, there a concerns that people are just throwing away their money when investing in a product that doesn't actually exist yet - or not even knowing what they're investing in.
CoinList has teamed up with lawyers to create a SAFT - a simple agreement for future tokens, which is essentially a contract to receive tokens in the future (since they don't exist yet).
Not everyone could participate in the ICO! You needed to either earn $200,000 a year or have a net worth of over $1 million.
This rule was proposed under the assumption that investors possessing this kind of wealth would be knowledgeable enough about the risks of the investment.
But this argumentation isn't necessarily true.
A lot of people like software engineers, developers, crypto specialists or students may have an extensive knowledge about ICO's and the crypto scene - but they may not have sufficient net worth to be accepted as an investor for the token sale.
This way, a huge section of potential investors from the cryptocurrency community was excluded from the ICO.
What do you think about the future of filecoin and about this ICO ?
© Sirwinchester