By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
Mobius Network raised $39 million selling its mobi tokens. Accepting only Stellar’s native currency lumens (XLM) in exchange for the tokens, the company contributed to Stellar’s popularity and growth in its price.
Mobius Network ran its initial coin offering (ICO) not on Ethereum, the most popular blockchain for token sales, but on the Stellar network. Accepting only Stellar’s native currency lumens (XLM) in exchange for its own token, known as mobi, the company raised $39 million after only two hours, selling 35 percent of the total 888 million mobi tokens.
Mobius Network co-founder and CEO David Gobaud said:
“We look at Ethereum like AOL or Myspace.”
The startup believs that Ethereum is an out-of-date currency. Ethereum struggles to scale, and its challenges have become acute in recent months.
“We realized there was no way that Ethereum could handle our technology. It was too slow, too expensive and too insecure. … We see all these other projects with these immense problems,” added Gobaud.
The company’s CEO also highlighted the problems with safely deploying smart contracts. “They are Turing complete programs, but they are really hard to write,” he said, pointing to the first and second multi-million-dollar ether losses on Parity. Gobaud argued that solidity was not built with security in mind. He said: “In Stellar we think we’ve uncovered this underutilized, really unknown technology.”
Stellar was designed specifically for frictionless payments. It supports multi-signature wallets at the protocol level, which makes custodianship much easier for developers. At the beginning of 2018, Stellar’s price was $0.36. According to CoinMarketCap, it currently costs $0,58. Yesterday the digital currency rose to as much as $0.65 at roughly 11:39 UTC (6:39 a.m. EST). In such a way Stellar had risen 17.7% over the course of 24 hours. As for Ethereum, its current price is $1018.
The main reason for such a leap is recent positive news. On January 23, payments provider Stripe announced that it would stop supporting bitcoin transactions, citing the problems of rising fees and longer transaction times. Further, Stripe revealed that it might add support for Stellar, depending on whether use of the network continues to expand.
On January 25, Mobius Network announced that it hit $39 million in the ICO, selling its mobi tokens. The sale is the largest by far on the Stellar platform. The project was started on Ethereum and then switched to Stellar, finding this technology more robust. This event encouraged Stellar’s prosperity as well.
The MOBI token is designed to enable companies and consumers to exchange data by smart contracts and plug into the blockchain ecosystem. It is described as a token integrating the old internet with the new decentralized internet similar to how Stripe integrates payment processing into Apps. According to Mobius, their API is designed to be easily integrated into any sight.
“It’s important for us to continue to help push the blockchain community into safer, faster, and more secure protocols,” said David Gobaud. “Our patent pending technology will have broad implications for businesses being able to operate more efficiently and with greater capability in the blockchain ecosystem. Our successful offering is further validation of our token’s real-world utility.”
The mobi token sale was scheduled to close on February 18th, but sold out in just over two hours. Mobius previously announced the closing of a $35 million private sale earlier in January. The pre-sale was said to be over-subscribed by $10 million. Participants included Jed McCaleb, Chandler Guo, and Jackson Palmer, each of who sit on Mobius’ Advisory Board.