DNA cofounders Scott Walker and Brock Pierce featured in Entrepreneur Magazine piece on ICOs
DNA exploring new models to challenge the traditional ICO
Entrepreneur Magazine just published “Initial Coin Offerings and the New Age of Startup Fundraising” explaining how innovations in blockchain are creating new versions of familiar models for raising funds. Author Scott Richter writes, “This decentralized access to capital is fueling the rise of blockchain applications in a massive way. But this increased popularity is also revealing ways the model needs to evolve.”
The piece includes this quote from DNA’s Scott Walker:
Scott Walker, managing partner of DNA, a firm that invests in transformative blockchain applications with massive network effects, said “We’re committed to being on the forefront of this movement exploring new models to challenge the traditional ICO in order to align incentives, mitigate risks, and better manage capital raised.”
It also discusses how DNA’s Brock Pierce and Scott Walker held the first ICO ever with the Mastercoin project.
The first ICO was held by Mastercoin July 31, 2013. Led by Brock Pierce and Scott Walker from DNA, the Mastercoin project officially launched with a public fundraiser where anyone could buy Mastercoins by sending bitcoins to a special wallet address. Investors holding tokens that supported the platform from its launch could sell them on an open market and realize a return as they increased in value when the project progressed. Approximately 500 people invested about 4,700 bitcoins in the project, which by December that year was worth about US $5M when bitcoins price-surged from about $100 to $1000.
Everipedia, a wiki-based, online encyclopedia, which is funded in part by DNA is also mentioned for its innovative approach to Airdropping IQ tokens.
Airdrops for example, happen when a blockchain project decides to distribute free tokens to the community that has expressed interest in the project. Though this typically happens after an ICO as a reward to the open market, the Airdrop provides an incentive that can be used to get users excited about an oncoming platform and incentivise their participation.
A recent example of this is Everipedia’s announcement that they would be foregoing the traditional ICO and instead Airdropping IQ tokens to all holders of EOS tokens, the platform on which Everipedia is built. This may be related to Block.one, the fund behind EOS committing to deploy up to US $1 Billion of capital alongside Partner VCs into the EOS.IO ecosystem.
