Bluzelle Completes ICO and Raises $19.5 Million
Another notable company has used cryptocurrency to unlock their next stage of funding.
Vancouver-based Bluzelle has closed its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and raised $19.5 million in total. The funding will go towards developing their decentralized database technology and fill the missing pieces involved in building a decentralized internet.
The ICO was structured a bit differently compared to other company’s token offerings. Often, a “fear-of-missing-out” style is introduced to potential buyers, goading them into a mad-dash to buy before time runs out. Instead, Bluzelle organized buyers intro groups who were given 24 hours to make their token purchases.
In total, 500 million tokens were generated for the ICO, with only 165 million going on sale. That means only 33 per cent of tokens were made available for public ownership, Investors included Kenetic Capital, Hashed, Kryptonite 1 and 8 Decimal Capital.
On the first day of the token sale, 360 buyers took part, which was an 85 per cent total turnout for the first group. That number jumped significantly for day two and group two, with 6,698 total buyers and a 95 per cent turnout rate. By day three, there were limited tokens left for sale, and both groups were able to take part on a first-come-first-served basis. Only two million tokens were left and they sold out within five seconds.
“Selling out the crowdsale is a huge milestone in the growth of our company and our journey to deliver a product that will be a key component of the new, better Internet,” said Pavel Bains, Bluzelle CEO. We have been into this technology for years and the CEOs and CTOs we work with are just as enthusiastic as us about the product, technology and the future. With this funding, we will now be able to bring our decentralized database to everyone.”
Bluzelle’s product helps to fill a major missing part of a decentralized internet as it provides data storage and management that was not really available up until now. Decentralized app developers obviously need data storage and management just as much as regular developers, but their systems need to be flexible enough to allow for simple and fast data queries. Bluzelle’s decentralized database solves those problems.
Ahead of the token sale, Bluzelle added some heavy hitters to their advisory board, including several champions of open-source and decentralized data.
Bluzelle was funded originally as a payment systems platform but opened up an office in Singapore in 2016 to focus on the growth of Asia and potential blockchain infrastructure for on-premise deployment.