Winklevoss Bros and USV Invested in $50 million Blockstack ICO

The initial coin offering (ICO) for Blockstack has just closed and it was just announced that they managed to raise about $50 million as a result of selling their 440 million tokens.

This ICO began back in November and it attracted a wide range of high-profile investors, such as Lux Capital, Union Square Ventures (USV), Winkelvoss Capital, Foundation Capital, Blockchain Capital, Digital Currency Group, Michael Arrington (founder of TechCrunch), Qasar Younis (partner at Y Combinator) and even the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose to name but a few.

They have all decided to invest their funds into the vision that Blockstack possesses whereby they believe they can create a web that is decentralised by utilising blockchain technology.

The team at Blockstack did emphasise the point that these investors were involved for the long run and they weren’t looking for quick returns. This something that will take time to research and develop, so patience will be needed by all parties involved.

The largest sized investment that they received came from an undisclosed endowment that was worth $6 million. This comes alongside a 4-year lock-up for half of this allocation, with the other big investors having a lockout for two years and at a maximum of $3 million.

One of the co-founders of Blockstack is Muneeb Ali and he said that his team approached the ICO more like they would a traditional funding round in the world of venture capital with a high-quality set of investors, as opposed to just getting random people on board who are looking to make a quick buck off of cryptocurrencies.

As well as this statement, there was also key figures and metrics release following the ICO. It showcased that there were over 800 contributors, whether they were individuals or entities when it came to the public token sale.

There was no presale of it and in the ICO, the minimum investment that you were able to make was $3,000, with the median investment being $6,140.

Of the funds that they raised through this ICO, Blockstack will only have access to $10 million of it straight away, with the rest of the fund being locked up until certain milestones have been reached.

The following sum of $20 million is going to be released after the board of advisors are able to verify that the next iteration of the product has been produced, which is a comprehensive network that has integration with the issued token.

Finally, the remaining $20 million will be released as soon as their last milestone has been hit, which is to acquire 1 million users that have been verified.

Blockstack was started back in 2013 and they have been in the process of building this decentralised architecture for the internet ever since, focusing specifically on user control.

In order to reach this lofty goal, their stack token will be running on their virtual chain technology as was outlined by their white paper.

This sale of the tokens was of course a vital part of this process and it allows the ecosystem that they have developed to thrive and continue to do so into the future.

 

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