The Initial Coin Offering (ICO) of the EOS token from Block.one has raised around US$700, in spite of the fact that holders will not be given any functions or rights. The ICO presently comprises the biggest ICO, with a launch scheduled in mid-2018.
What is EOS?
EOS is an altcoin developed by programmer Dan Larimer and online entrepreneur Brendan Blumer. Larimer received criticisms for abandoning projects such as Steemit and Bitshares. Charles Hoskinson, a former teammate of Larimer, said that the programmer has not completed any project.
Meanwhile, Brock Pierce, the chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, is serving as an adviser to the EOS and granted with a minority share in the startup. Block.one is a duly registered company in the Cayman Islands, and composed of around 50 employees. The project’s development occurs via an open-source program, and so, they don’t have a centralized office.
This October, Pierce confirmed that the token had already achieved its $700 million target. He also added that Block.one is presently selling around 2 million tokens every day. Based on a report by the Wall Street Journal, this figure is bigger than the raised fund by all except 10 of the 195 IPOs in the US in 2017.
The raised amount make the EOS token sale the biggest ever. And with the bullish market in December, EOS is now the 10th biggest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization – with a total market capitalization of around $6.75 billion as of press time. Pierce is confident that the ICO is strongly positioned to raise around $2 billion before the final development of EOS.
Block.one will receive 10% of the total EOS supply
In spite of the high volume of money raised, Block.one is planning to develop the code for EOS before the public release. It will outsource the development of the platform to third-party services Hence, EOS coins will not provide its holder any rights, features, and functionalities.
The company is also planning to access a percentage of the capital raised to invest in startups who want to operate using their platform. It is not yet clear how investors can take advantage of these investments.
Wall Street Journal opined that token investors choose to overlook the lack of legal rights in holding EOS coins, viewing this fact as likely to be a non-harmful necessity for Bock.one to guard itself against the present climate of ambiguity in regulation surrounding the legality of digital currency startups.
Early investors in EOS defended the company’s terms of service, while others are also cautious in their evaluation of the token sale. For instance, Rik Willard, founder of the Agentic Group, said that the surging demand for EOS coins is an indicator of the present craze surrounding digital currencies.
