UPDATED 21:33 EDT / JULY 02 2017

EMERGING TECH

It’s another initial coin offering record: Block.One raises $185M

Another day, another record initial coin offering.

Block.One, developer of the new blockchain platform EOS.IO, announced Saturday that it has raised $185 million through an initial offering of its cryptocurrency “tokens,” beating the previous record of $150 million raised by Bancor in mid-June.

Based in Hong Kong, Block.One’s EOS.IO aims to “decentralize everything” with a platform that can support thousands of commercial-scale decentralized apps and parallel execution along with asynchronous communication. “Block.one intends for the EOS.IO software to support distributed applications that have the same look and feel as existing web-based applications, but with all of the benefits of the blockchain – namely transparency, security, process integrity, speed and lower transaction costs,” the company said in a press release.

The platform is unashamedly aiming at high-volume enterprise users, with a promise that it can support hundreds of thousands of transactions a second without charging users any fee, more than the 24,000 transactions that Visa handles every second, according to Tech In Asia.

The company justified the choice of an ICO over a traditional venture capital fundraising as being “a ground-breaking token participation model by creating what is intended to be the fairest token distribution project launched on Ethereum to date.” The fundraising was done despite the company not even having a prototype to demonstrate, with potential investors have to put their faith in a published white paper instead.

The ICO offered up only 200 million EOS tokens out of the 1 billion tokens the company has created, meaning that the ICO raise values Block.One, on paper, at a staggering $925 million.

Other recent, not quite as highly valued ICO’s include blockchain-based supercomputing startup SONM, which raised $42 million in mid-June. Former Mozilla Chief Executive Brendan Eich’s Brave web browser, which unlike Block.One actually has a tangible, working product, raised $35 million in May.

Image: EOS.IO

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