An initial coin offering to fund a mining operation that would have signaled support for Bitcoin Unlimited has been called off. The ICO was linked to Chandler Guo.

According to reports, the EXX/XBTC ICO for the largest global project in Ethereum Classic history is being terminated due to its inability to achieve the set target as only about 16.47 percent of the set-out target was reached.

As a result, all the funds that have been generated so far (about ￥33 mln) will be returned to senders’ original accounts.

This comes after the second stage of the ICO that started March 9 and ended on April 8.

Guo, who recently announced his support for the Bitcoin Unlimited, promoted the ICO using a personal reward link he is neither one of the ICO organizers nor the owner of EXX.

EXX, which had earlier come out against Guo's open support for BU saying it was a personal opinion as their pool did not vote regarding BU or SegWit, also confirmed the termination of the EXX/XBTC project due to "uncontrollable factors."

There are indications that Guo’s identification with BU played a role in the poor response to the project.

Hashpower to BU

The initial idea was to take his hash rate of around 50 petahash (about 1.5 percent of the network) out of a leading Bitcoin miner BW.com and into a new X-Pool which would mine directing its hashpower at Bitcoin Unlimited.

The XBTC token, created using the Ethereum Classic Blockchain, had been set to issue a 21 mln target with Guo’s plan to meet a funding goal of 12 mln ETC in the ICO purposely to increase the pool’s hashpower, according to the ICO site.

Making a jump

However, since he announced on March 21 that he was making the jump to voting for BU along with all his mining pool’s hashpower, several questions have been raised especially by those who see the Chinese investor as a big believer in the cryptocurrency revolution.

Others saw in him a person who would restore the needed confidence in Bitcoin by supporting BU instead of Bitcoin Core’s supported SegWit protocol.

They view his stance as one of Guo’s ways of stating his opinion publicly and backing it up with hash power in the midst of the division in the Bitcoin community over the scalability issue.

Vested interests

He has a vested interest in Ethereum Classic (ETC) so he has offered capital to ETC startups working with the protocol.

Guo launched an ICO to fund Chinese cryptocurrency exchange ETCwin which raised 1,769 BTC (about $2.2 mln as the time of this writing).

EXX, which had earlier come out against Guo's open support for BU saying it was a personal opinion as their pool did not vote regarding BU or SegWit, also confirmed the termination of the EXX/XBTC project due to "uncontrollable factors."