The decentralized management platform offering blockchain services for businesses has raised the record amount in the first few minutes of its Initial Coin Offering.
Aragon announced today that it has raised almost $25 million from buyers around the world during its token sale, which became the 4th highest funded crowdsale ever.
The sum of investment makes Aragon token sale one of the largest ICOs ever. The previous champion, ethereum-based prediction market platform Gnosis, obtained $12.5 million also in about 15 minutes.
“We are extremely delighted with the success of our token sale and are humbled that the community has placed this trust in Aragon,” said Luis Cuende, the co-founder of Aragon. “We now have the resources to hire the best talent and execute one of the most ambitious projects, one which has the potential to create a more equal and fair society.”
The sale was planned to run until June 14, 2017, but was closed out in less than 15 minutes, with investors buying a total of 275,000 ETH.
Prior to the sale, Aragon partnered with a leading digital asset exchange ShapeShift to allow investors acquire more than 45 virtual currencies, including bitcoin, ether, litecoin, and dash. ShapeShift is a digital exchange allowing trading of various digital assets via web and mobile platforms without having to sign up or register emails. However, the full amount raised by Aragon was in ether because of the high speed of the crowdsale.
“For our token sale, we placed a huge focus on security, not wanting to put the Ethereum Network at any risk. Therefore, we set a hard coded cap into the sale contract,” Cuende added.
The investment will be used by Aragon to develop Aragon Core and the Aragon Network (AN) and implement security audits. The startup also plans to expand its staff to 10 people in 2017. This month, Aragon founded a non-profit organization Aragon Institution MTÜ that will store and allocate the revenues from the crowdsale.
The Aragon Network will be the first decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that will act as a digital jurisdiction and will provide main services to investors, entrepreneurs and companies. The network will develop the Aragon Core contracts, contract upgradability services for Aragon Core contracts with a built-in bug bounty mechanism, and a decentralized court system.
“In their very nature companies exist to create value. We believe in people’s ability to innovate and exchange ideas irrespective of borders and third party intermediaries. Therefore, Aragon was born to unleash people’s true capability by removing unnecessary barriers and allowing the global permissionless co-operation of talent,” Cuende said.
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