Brave, the new web browser from former Mozilla Foundation Chief Executive Officer Brendan Eich, has broken at least one record as the company raised $35 million in an initial coin offering that sold out in 30 seconds, faster than any previous coin offering.

The ICO offered for sale 156,250 Ethereum-based Basic Attention Tokens created by Brave Software Inc. The units of value akin to bitcoin can be traded among publishers, advertisers and users and used to get a “variety of advertising and attention-based services on the Brave platform,” according to the company.

The sale saw one buyer alone acquire the equivalent of 20,000 ETH ($4.7 million) in tokens and another buyer pay more than $6,000 in ethereum mining fees to guarantee a place at the top of the line, according to Coindesk. All told, only 130 people were able to buy the tokens before they sold out, with five buyers purchasing approximately half the total supply.

Despite the apparent success of the ICO, the small number of buyers makes it more of an insider sale than a proper public offering. Still, it’s seen as a potential boost for the overall ICO market.

One venture capitalist, Susan Tavel of Benchmark, said recently that she envisions ICOs becoming more of a mainstream fundraising tool, though her fellow VCs on a panel last week mostly disagreed. However, one venture-backed company, payment gateway startup Omise, plans to raise $19 million in an ICO. TechCrunch called it the “first cryptocurrency sale from a major VC-backed startup,” though Brave itself had raised a seed round from VC firms.

Even closer to Brave’s offering, the advertising blockchain company MetaX plans to hold an ICO June 26 for a platform called adChain that it created with ConsenSys. The tokens it’s selling allow holders to participate in the platform.

Brave’s shift to a token-based model is a change from its original intentions when it first launched in April 2016. The original pitch for the browser, which has ad blocking built in as standard, was to give users the ability to view ads from the Brave network in place of standard site ads and to earn bitcoins for doing so, whereas the shift to tokens means that users will now be paid in BAT instead.

Although it’s not spelled out in the site for the ICO, the change to a token-based platform is likely thanks to the ever increasing value of bitcoin, making payments using an in-house generated cryptocurrency likely easier to manage for Brave than bitcoin. Even though BAT is focused on and obviously linked to payments on Brave, BAT is a standalone token in its own right that will be openly tradable across a variety of third-party cryptocurrency exchange sites.

Brave’s business model still faces challenges ahead, namely whether its model of monetizing third-party sites by overlaying its own ads is legal to begin with. Newspaper publishers sent the company legal warnings last year, and though it’s not clear whether that has been followed up with legal action, there’s every chance that at some stage in the future Brave will be facing a barrage of court cases.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: Brave