To celebrate the one-year anniversary of its software going open-source, Dragonchain Inc., a blockchain platform originally developed at the Walt Disney Co., today announced its initial coin offering.

According to Dragonchain, the coin offering will involve a crowdsale of currency tokens, called “Dragons,” running from Oct. 2 to Nov. 2.

The tokens sold in the ICO will provide access to the platform services for users and developers and the funds raised from the sale will be used to foster project incubation and build out professional services to support enterprises, start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Dragonchain was originally developed at Disney’s Seattle campus between 2015 and 2016 under the moniker “Disney Private Blockchain Platform.” The project was designed as a cryptographic distributed ledger technology aimed at business interests and officially launched as an open-source project on Oct. 2, 2016.

The project is now maintained by the Dragonchain Foundation and the ICO effort of Dragonchain Inc. is not affiliated with Disney.

“Our vision for Dragonchain is a secure and flexible blockchain platform paired with a crowd scaled incubator,” said Joe Roets, founder and chief executive of Dragonchain Inc. “The system is modeled to create feedback loops and accelerate blockchain projects and market success.”

Initial coin offerings, or ICOs, are an increasingly popular method for blockchain technology companies to raise funding for projects. They involve a crowdsale of tokens that can be used to execute transactions on the network and therefore access services provided by the blockchain.

As a funding technique, ICOs have proven extremely profitable for some. In July, blockchain startup Tezos broke records with an ICO that raised $230 million. More recently Grid+, a renewable energy project from Consensus Systems Inc., raised $40 million in an ICO presale at the end of September. Other notable ICOs include $35 million raised for the privacy-enhanced Brave browser and $5.2 million raised by financial services blockchain company Humaniq.

Dragonchain expects to sell around 238 million tokens, called “Dragons,” over the next month, which are immediately available for sale to the public.

The objective of Dragonchain is to build out a blockchain network similar to but more private than Ethereum, the second-most popular blockchain network ecosystem behind Bitcoin. Ethereum’s blockchain premise is built on application development and the ability to support smart contracts, which enable businesses to automate rules-based transactions according to strict conditions.

According to a report from Business Insider, Dragonchain’s objective is to be more private than Ethereum by providing extra layers of security on data stored in the distributed ledger. Using its technology, Dragonchain takes a hybrid approach where some data is publicly visible and other data is privately locked away.

“The main difference would be that with Ethereum or any public blockchains, your data is out there,” Roets said. “You can do certain things to obfuscate your data. You could encrypt it. But it won’t matter in 10 years or 20 years.”

With Dragonchain, developers can make use of popular programming languages including Java, Python, Node and C# in order to program applications that use smart contracts. Additionally, all smart contracts written for Dragonchain will have full access to the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud through the platform for scalability and distribution.

In an effort to maintain its vision as a business-centric and enterprise-ready blockchain platform, Dragonchain also invited luminaries from the blockchain industry to its advisory board. This includes Jeff Garzik, co-founder of enterprise-grade blockchain service company Bloq Inc.

“Dragonchain’s context-based approval ushers in a new era of inter-linked blockchain databases, multi-dimensional datastores that scale to customer requirements,” said Garzik. He added that Dragonchain represents “the latest in blockchain technology, combining ease of integration, cloud scalability and secure grounding in public blockchain networks.”

Others joining Dragonchain’s advisory board include Matthew Roszak, co-founder of Bloq; Ed Fries, tech industry advisor and co-founder of the original Xbox; Collin LaHay of Collin Crypto and founder of the Gambit cryptocurrency; Tom Bush, former assistant director of the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division; and Chris Boscolo, founder of identity management software startup LifeID.

Image: Dragonchain