2017 has been the year of the ICO's. We've seen countless new token launches in the last few months, and even some mainstream companies are getting into it now - but yesterday, one particular ICO broke all records.
The Token sale for "Brave" sold out in under 30 seconds - raising an unbelievable amount of $35 million in less than half a minute!
Yes, you read that right. That's more than $1 Million per second!
This might be the ICO with the largest capital raised in the shortest amount of time - ever.
To be exact, 156,250 Ether were raised within 24 seconds.
"Digital advertising is broken. It is a market filled with middlemen and fraudsters, hurting users, publishers and advertisers. The Basic Attention Token (BAT) was developed to address this. BAT, an ERC20 token built on top of Ethereum, will be the token of utility in a new, decentralized, open source and efficient blockchain-based digital advertising platform."-BasicAttentionToken.org
What is Brave's Ethereum-based "Basic Attention Token" (BAT) all about?
So the coin of this ICO is called "Basic Attention Token", made by the people behind the Browser Software "Brave".
Part of the team are Mozilla co-founder Brenden Eich and Brian Bondy from Evernote and Khan Academy.
The concept behind this token is to revolutionize digital advertising.
Currently, digital advertising comes with quite a lot of disadvantages for advertisers, publishers and users.
Advertisers and publishers suffer from ad-blocking software which has been booming in the last few years, and users (especially on mobile) are getting their battery and data drained by loading countless apps on browser sites.
This is where the BAT comes in: Users surfing with the Brave Browser will receive rewards in form of BATs for having ads displayed in their Browser (without ad-block!), and both advertisers and publishers benefit as well!
So users essentially get rewarded with BATs for viewing ads, Publishers receive BATs based on the user's attention, and advertisers benefit from better targeting and higher ROI.
"In the ecosystem, advertisers will give publishers BATs based on the measured attention of users. Users will also receive some BATs for participating. They can donate them back to publishers or use them on the platform. This transparent system keeps user data private while delivering fewer but more relevant ads. Publishers experience less fraud while increasing their percentage of rewards. And advertisers get better reporting and performance."-BasicAttentionToken.org
The Brave browser is already fully published since 2016, and the BAT tokens are to be added soon.
Currently, Brave is being used by about 100 million users - which may sound like a lot, but is actually quite a small number compared to browser-giants like Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
They currently already have an integrated system which gives out an amount of bitcoin allotted by the user to their favorite websites.
But with integrating their very own cryptocurrency BAT, Brave aims to make its software much more attractive for both users and advertisers.
Another goal of them is to cut out 3rd parties, which is currently a big problem in the digital advertising world. Brave wants to complete all transactions directly, without 3rd parties involved.
In the future, the team plans to expand the uses for BAT tokens separately from the Browser Software.
Now back to the record-breaking ICO.
Some users are getting quite upset about how the ICO went, since only a fraction of potential buyers actually managed to get some of the tokens.
The problem is that the majority of tokens was purchased by "whales" with huge investements, leaving almost no chance for average joe to place his investment.
Only around 130 users were able to place an order at all.
One party currently holds 25% of tokens which is quite shocking, and only five investors now own over 50% of tokens.
The top 20 buyers from the token sale now control more than two-thirds of all BAT tokens. We will see if this unproportionate distribution of tokens will have consequences in the future!
What's your opinion about the BAT-concept of "Blockchain Digital Advertising"? Great future investment or not enough potential?
Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
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