Blockchain Project Bancor Completes Largest-Ever ICO, Raises More than $150M in 3 Hours

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by Anastasiya Vanyukevich · 3 min read

The Bancor token project raised about $150 million on Monday in an initial coin offering (ICO), making it the second-largest fundraising campaign in the blockchain industry.

The Bancor Network raised almost 400.000 ETH, which is equivalent to $142 million at an Ethereum price of $360 in less than 3 hours on Monsay. The result was achieved even despite numerous cyber attacks on the fundraiser’s network, application and website that affected the velocity of transactions settlement and prompted the team to prolong the minimum funding time from one hour to three.

“In our efforts to ensure full community participation, even after overwhelming demand and traffic, exacerbated by massive malicious attacks to our network, the Bancor team opted to extend the restriction-free hour in an effort to ensure that pending transactions were completed. When the “hidden cap” was revealed, the flood of transactions that arrived was even more overwhelming,” Bancor says.

The Monday fundraising campaign was later declared to be the largest one in the blockchain industry, Bancor’s official website claims.  Overall, the ICO attracted 10,885 buyers with more than 15,000 transactions during the sale. There’s also an outstanding buyer who rushed to purchase as many as 6.9m BNT, or roughly $27m, in the sale.

More than 79m Bancor network tokens were created so far and 50pc have been already sold to the public, while the remaining 50pc were allocated for future use. The blockchanin project has previously said that “50pc of BNTs will be issued to the contributors in the fundraiser; 20pc allocated to partnerships, community grants and public bounties; 20pc to the foundation’s long-term operating budget; and 10pc to founders, team members, advisers and early contributors.”

Ethereum Name Service’s core developer, Nick Johnson, conducted two independent audits and revealed that he didn’t find any critical issues with Bancor’s token offering. In his report, the specialist said there’re no issues that would presented security vulnerabilities or an undue advantage to massive cyber attacks. He went on, adding:

“This issue is common to all onchain exchanges, and countermeasures are difficult for any exchange, though on talking to the Bancor team they have suggestions for future improvements. Bancor have somewhat mitigated frontrunning by requiring users to specify a minimum price at which a trade will be executed, to hedge against large price shifts.”

Created in 2017, Bancor has stated itseld as a platform designed to simplify the process of users’ own blockchain tokens aiming to solve the liquidity problem for the long-tail of user-generated cryptocurrencies.

Israel-based prediction market blockchain project provides with the possibility to create “smart tokens” – the first blockchain currency issued using its protocol – which can contain one or more Bancor-compatible tokens in reserve. Bancor also allows to purchase or liquidate these tokens using smart contract that doesn’t presuppose any contacts with counterparties and exchanges.

Meanwhile, the Bitcoin price has reached its new record of $3,000. Bitcoin sets a new all-time high just in time when alternative cryptocurrencies see considerable inflows.

Blockchain News, News, Token Sales