Block.one, an open source software publisher based in Hong Kong but incorporated in the Cayman Islands, that says it specializes in “high performance blockchain technologies,” has been running a year-long ICO fundraising process. This fundraiser concludes this Friday.
After only a few days of starting the fundraiser process, in June 2017, Block.one was reported to have raised an impressive US$185 million.
Now, some 350 days later, the Wall Street Journal is reporting it has raised more than $4 billion. This will make it the largest fundraising of its kind. To date the largest coin offering was reported to have been run by Pavel Duvov’s Telegram Group. The 33-year-old Russian maverick is said to have raised $1.7 billion for Telegram, but Block.one’s offering, if the Journal’s numbers are right, will more than double this.
Like Telegram, Block.one’s founders, Brendan Blumer and Dan Larimer, are 30-something tech entrepreneurs. Both are Americans and Blumer, who Forbes reports started his first business when he was 14, relocated to Hong Kong when he was still teenager.
The startup’s main product is the EOS software platform that allows developers to use it to build their own blockchain applications. EOS, says Block.one, can support hundreds of thousands of transactions a second without charging users any fees and does so to provide “accounts, authentication, databases and the scheduling of applications across multiple CPU cores and/or clusters.”
Governments across the world have been taking action against many initial coin offerings that they say have been exposed as money-grabbing scams. Block.one does seem to be different, and not just because its executive team has a strong track record and the business has a solid corporate governance set-up.
It’s ambition is certainly big, in that its intention is the EOS platform will significantly reshape the online world in the same way Google did, but the crucial difference is that the EOS platform will not be owned by a single company but by the many developers working on it.
Block.one, reports the Journal, also does not plan to develop any more software once it has released its platform next month but intends to let others do so. Block.one, says the WSJ, has pledged to invest more than $1 billion in startups building on EOS. This also makes Block.one different because it will be the first ICO that doesn’t just take lots of money but also gives lots of it away too.
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