Amid an edit war in which Bitcoiners argue Ethereum’s DAO’s are crowdsales and another group arguing they are in fact IPOs, the recent Ethereum product known as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations has raced to the top of the largest “crowd sales” of all time. Below is a list of all the blockchain related crowd sales ranked in order.
1 DAO
May 28, 2016
120,000,000
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) have been a popular topic recently in the blockchain space. Ethereum announced a curated list of DAOs, which are organizations built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Funds were raised in Ether.
The DAO is intended to function as “a hub that disperses funds (currently in Ether, the Ethereum value token) to other startups and projects. Backers of The DAO receive voting rights by means of a digital share token, which can be used to help determine the future direction of the organization and which projects will actually get funded following a voting period.”
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The DAO is organized in the form of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. The DAO will use its company, DAO.Link as a “bridge between blockchain-based DAOs and the real world, where contractors need to pay taxes and adhere to regulatory requirements in their respective jurisdictions.”
The DAO’s operations are managed “purely through code.” According to the project, the DAO “offers complete transparency, total shareholder control, unprecedented flexibility, and autonomous governance.”
2 Ethereum blockchain
September 2 2014
18,439, 086
Ethereum is the first public blockchain after Bitcoin to capture the public mind. It offers first its decentralized virtual machine, meant to executed via peer-to-peer contracts using its native currency, Ether.
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Proposed by Vitalik Buterin in late 2013 and in 2014, he described it as “A Next-Generation Cryptocurrency and Decentralized Application Platform.” Funded by a crowd sale in August 2014, the project first launched on July 30, 2015.
The current market capitalization of Ethereum is $901,779,903.
3 Lisk
March 21 2016
5,880, 089
Lisk claims to be developing a decentralized application platform featuring a distributed payment system and native currency network, like Bitcoin. Lisk also enables the deployment and distribution of decentralized applications on the Lisk blockchain, like Ethereum.
4 DigixDao
March 30, 2015,
$500,000
DigixDAO is a blockchain application built atop the Ethereum blockchain, and based on gold bullion. The crowdsale was offered in DGD tokens. Each DGD token enables you an apportioned return on DGX. The maximum for this project was reached in 12 hours. Digix seeks to combine Ethereum and Interplanetary File System to create a way of transferring crypto-assets, such as crypto-gold.
5 Augur
October 1 2015,
$5,318, 330
Augur has been a long developing blockchain technology, and the team hopes to be a robust prediction market leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds,
On a blockchain-based distributed ledger, Augur wants to develop a way of predicting any future event regarding and topic of interest. The Wisdom of Crowds, upon which Augur hopes to capitalize, stems from free market lines of reasoning.
The project was undoubtedly one of the first to leverage Ethereum. Like so much in the blockchain space, the philosophy can be traced to conservative – or libertarian – economic concepts.
Augur made it to the finals of the Exponential Finance XCS Challenge, which feathred judges from Forbes, Barclays, Deloitte, Wells Fargo and Credit Suisse. Coinbase once selected Augur as one of the most exciting Bitcoin projects in 2015.
6 Mastercoin
September 1 ,2013
$5,000
Mastercoin has been developing a digital currency and communications protocol upon the Bitcoin blockchain. It rebranded itself as Omni. Many claim the project to be dead, and many criticisms have been lobbied at Omni. Omni markets itself as the most robust decentralized platform, capable of providing the underpinning for other blockchain projects like Factom, Maidsafe and Tether. Capable of creating and trading digital assets and currencies.
Mastercoin was first introduced in a white paper published in January 2012. Author J.R. Willet wrote that the Bitcoin protocol “can be used as a protocol layer, on top of which new currency layers with new rules can be built without changing the foundation.”
Currently, the total market capitalization of Omni is approximately $759,662
Another popular blockchain technology, Maidsafe, used Mastercoin to raise funds in its original crowd sale.
There are many other examples of crowdfunded blockchain projects. These are simply the best funded via crowdsale. Many of them, furthermore, are largely theoretical models. Ethereum, with coverage by mainstream media, has certainly become the most popular, and easily the most succesful blockchain-based crowd sales