It seemed only a few weeks ago when we were talking about the historic ICO of Tezos which managed to pull in an unprecedented $232 million raise in July. This has now been overtaken by the Filecoin ICO which managed to secure just over $257m in funding.
The ICO began on the 10th of August when FileCoin managed to quickly secure millions in investments via CoinList, a join project. This launch day had a large influx of purchases of Simple Agreements for Future Tokens (SAFTs). These are essentially like stock futures and gave the holders the opportunity to secure future tokens when they went live. The launch was in such high demand that the website had capacity issues during the sale.
The ICO completed the open funding round with about $209m in crypto currency that was raised from retail participants. If one were to include the $52m that was raised in the presale then we have the largest ICO ever. This $52m presale was apportioned to investors including Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
Although the first day of the raise was extremely frenetic, it did indeed peter out as the final weeks of the raise came to a close. The last three days of the raise saw this number taken a bit higher by about another $3m.
The idea behind filecoin is to use blockchain technology and decentralised networks for digital storage. Users who have free space on their computers and servers can rent this out to others in return for payment with the Tokens. They are trying to democratize storage on the web.
As Filecoin wraps up on ICO, we have many more to come in September. It seems as if this month will trounce July in terms of the amount of funds raised through ICO. That month saw a record $500m raised from coin offerings. If we were to look at the period June to September, the number is a staggering $797m.
