The sale of cryptocurrencies by companies is the new way of conducting a public offering, now being termed as the Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Although it has become a new trend in the business but the way Brenden Eich has carried it, is undoubtedly inspiring. Brenden, the former CEO of Mozilla, is now the founder of a web browser called BRAVE which raised an amount of $35 million through an ICO in less than even 30 seconds. Interestingly, the proceeds of this ICO will be used to create an advertising platform.
Operationally, ICOs sell cryptocurrencies to investors which are used to store value in many ways unlike a typical public share. BRAVE came up with its own coin called the Basic Attention Token (BAT). It managed to sell one billion units of this coin thus collecting an amount of over $35 million or an equivalent BAT cost of 156,250 ETH.
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According to a BRAVE official, an additional 500 million BAT is kept for user growth and BAT development as the company is not planning another sale in near future.
BRAVE ICO was mainly dominated by a few people who bought majority of BAT. The entire sale had only 130 people with only one buyer taking up a chunk of $4.6 million having a worth of 20,000 ETH. Additionally, there were only five buyers taking up 50% of the sale and 20 purchasers buying 2/3 of the total coins.
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BRAVE has some out of the box plans
Currently, ICO is very popular in the business corridors and BRAVE is using a Blockchain structure to make things more efficient. The former CEO of Mozilla has raised $7 million from different investors which includes Founders Fund for Brave.
He plans to change the entire mechanism of internet advertising which he believes is currently inefficient. He has a vision to make the entire system more efficient for all stakeholders including advertisers, publishers and users by using the blockchain system.
Similar structure is seen in Kik, a popular messaging service in North America. It has also announced its own ‘Kin coin’ as its own virtual currency. Kin coin would be used to pay for related goods and services. Thus, exactly same approach is adopted by Brave since it plans to use BAT as a currency for its advertising system and reduce the chances of fraud. In addition, Brave also hopes that it will make the system more prompt for advertisers and publishers. Going forward, BAT also has the capacity to be used as a micro currency for buying digital goods.
Brave promises its customers to deliver faster loading times, stringent privacy controls and also anticipates to make money by mere reading online content.
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Purchasing a token enables any buyer to take a share in the company. Large investors, organizations or early moving VC firms would be one of the most significant component when the company is selling coins worth millions of dollars. However, one of the biggest challenge would be to ensure that smaller firms are also included in this system once ICOs become common in future.
In a little while, token sale will become popular as another Asia based payment firm Omise is also planning to raise $20 million from its token sale this month. Once the idea picks up, large tech companies are going to back it up with its funds.
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