In an effort to raise money for his new company, Brave, Mozilla’s former CEO Brendan Eich, has successfully raised $35 million by offering cryptocurrencies from his new virtual money startup instead of the usual form of shares to its investors.
While there haven’t been many people who were that much into initial coin offerings (ICO), that all changed when Eich successfully did it in seconds.
Appealing to business
Eich, who was the CEO of Mozilla until he left in 2014, was able to raise a total of $7 million for Brave. His vision is to aid in fixing the current internet advertising system with the blockchain making things smoother and more efficient.
ICOs were introduced as virtual currencies that could replace the traditional type of share. For this purpose, the Basic Attention Token also known as BAT was created by company developing Brave. Brave was able to sell one billion BATs wherein $35 million were collected for Eich. The rest were saved for the company’s future development.
The idea of offering cryptocurrency or virtual currency became quite appealing to business in the tech industry that even Kik, a messenger developer in America, announced its plans to create a Kin cryptocurrency token which can be used for paying goods and services. That was the exact same path that Brave took when introducing their own coin. They also plan to make use of the BAT currency created by Brave in order to revamp their advertising system.
Brave’s system aim to give users faster loading and stronger security when handling virtual money and transactions. The money raised from the ICO will be used for making a more developed and more efficient advertising system.
Rise in companies offering token sale instead of shares
With this sort of movement in the virtual currency, coins are predicted to become more common and widespread when cryptocurrency companies decide to use them in place of shares. In fact, Max Mersch, venture capitalist at Open Ocean VC believes that,
“token sales are a new mechanism for blockchain based companies & projects to raise funds from their communities and early adopters”.
It is also expected that a lot of large investors, including business owners and corporations themselves will be involved in the sales of millions of dollars worth of these virtual coins. However, virtual currency firms are also sure to leave some space for the smaller investors that would also want to participate in this new technology. The fundamental goal of Brave and other similar developers would be to make ICOs commonplace so that companies will be able to take part in the new innovation.
Other than Kik and Mozilla, another Asian based payment company known as Omise has also began to express interest in joining these two companies. They are now getting ready to raise at most $20 million for more tokens this month. This interest stemmed out from the interest that many established tech companies are having over these coins. They also believe that the future has a place for this system and it may be a good idea to start as early as now to be a part of big.
Aside from these companies, ICOs are expected to rise as more companies and organized investors will become more accepting of virtual currency.