2016: The Year Blockchain ICOs Disrupted Venture Capital
You may have missed it in 2016, but initial coin offerings, or ICOs, have become the dominant way to fund new cryptocurrency projects. In an ICO, a project sells part of the total token supply to early adopters in exchange for money with which to progress. ICOs have two primary benefits: they provide funding to the team to see the project through, and incentivize a community to contribute (who gain if the project succeeds and the tokens are worth more than they bought them for). Although 2016 witnessed a high number of ICOs, they are not a new phenomenon and some ICOs from earlier than....
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Will blockchain technology disrupt venture capital? While not long ago that may have sound far-fetched, now more and more blockchain industry leaders are betting it could be a possibility. Blockchain token sales – sometimes known as initial coin offerings or 'ICOs' – raised over $100m in funding in 2016, and as participation in these events increases, so does interest in what was once a niche blockchain use case. Entrepreneurs are now seeking to leverage ICOs to quickly launch apps and gain users for software projects. At present, though, it still isn't clear if the funding method's full....
Initial coin offerings (ICOs) and appcoins are a hot topic in the blockchain community these days. Forward-thinking investors have thrown their support behind the movement, thought leaders have proclaimed that ICOs are turning the traditional venture capital model on its head, and bitcoin industry veterans have launched hedge funds to invest in blockchain tokens. I expect this discussion and activity to gain momentum in 2017, but I remain skeptical. As the most active investor in blockchain startups, we at Digital Currency Group are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the growth of ICOs.....
Initial cryptocurrency offerings, or initial coin offerings, (ICOs) are the flavor du jour in the sprawling crypto-tech market. As I've described in previous writings, ICOs represent a fundamental shift in how companies get funded, at least when compared to the traditional venture capital driven methods. What I inferred from that post is that the way forward is a clever combination of both worlds, the old and the new, a point that Zenel Batagelj from ICONOMI picked-up in "ICO 2.0 – what is the ideal ICO?" – a good post that I strongly recommend. For background, I’ve already....
Following the Brexit vote in June, there has been a significant drop in venture capital funding in London, prompting some to think that the city could lose its position as the FinTech capital. According to a report from the Financial Times, new figures released show that funding in the FinTech sector dropped in 2016. Innovate Finance, the U.K.’s financial technology trade body, found that since Brexit venture capital funding dropped as FinTech companies in the U.K. deal with the Brexit effects. Innovate Finance reported that, globally, venture capital funding for FinTech companies grew....
U.K. FinTech startups raised $173 million across 16 deals in Q4 2016, an increase of $95 million from Q3, according to a report from CB Insights. The report, The Global FinTech Report Full Year 2016, from the company which tracks venture capital investment, looked at FinTech venture capital across markets in Europe, Asia and North America. The results found that investment within financial technology firms had risen by 122 percent between October and December 2016 with the number of deals taking place increasing by 33 percent. Despite an increase in U.K. financial technology investment....