CoinList has booked another speedy initial coin offering (or initial token offering) as Origin Protocol easily raised $6.6 million. Origin shares that $2 million of that came in under five minutes – a testament to investor demand.
Origin Protocol previously completed a strategic funding found of $28.4 million this year where 190 investors joined to back the blockchain based firm. This most recent funding round brought in more than 500 new investors from 55 different countries. Origin says that over 1800 investors expressed their interest in participating in the round that held a nominal interest totaling $120 million. The earlier strategic round included well known VC names with Foundation Capital 
and BlockTower Capital participating alongside Silicon Valley angels like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Y Combinator partner Garry Tan, and Uber founding advisor Steve Jang. In December 2017, crypto VC and hedge fund Pantera Capital led a $3 million advisor round.
Andy Bromberg, Co-Founder and President of CoinList, said that Origin has several key indicators that CoinList investors are looking for: an experienced team, investment and advisory partners, a clear roadmap, and a record of execution.
“With a working product and a team from technology giants like PayPal, YouTube, Google, and Dropbox, Origin intends to help the digital currency industry achieve the market credibility, financial stability, and sustainable growth needed to realize its full potential,” Bromberg said.
Jon Hearty, Head of BizDev at Origin, said there are many reasons why they took a different approach to issuers who raised as much as they could as quickly as possible (IE Bancor etc.). Hearty said they sought to spread the tokens to a wide geography to help evangelize their mission. They also wanted to be certain that one single investor did not control too many tokens while enabling smaller investors to join in. Hearty also complimented the team at CoinList;
“When we decided to go through another round of fundraising, choosing to do so through CoinList was a no-brainer. They supported not only our ambitious mission to decentralize peer-to-peer marketplaces, but also our goal to optimize for total new investors rather than total money raised, a key factor in our efforts to build a global community of Origin enthusiasts … We would also like to thank the amazing team at CoinList for working overtime to ensure the round went as smoothly as possible.”
Origin Protocol, an open-source blockchain platform for creating peer-to-peer marketplaces like decentralized versions of Airbnb, Uber, CraigsList etc.
Origin has recently released their DApp that runs entirely on client-side code and does not rely on centralized servers or private databases controlled by Origin or other entities. The DApp puts into practice the theory that, with the help of the Ethereum blockchain and IPFS, it is possible to create marketplace experiences that are decentralized and available everywhere.
Origin is scheduled for a public launch on the Ethereum mainnet in Q3 2018 – so pretty soon. Origin reports that in the past few months, it has seen nearly 1,900 commits to its repos on GitHub and merged over 530 pull requests from more than 40 open-source contributors.
Origin says it is executing on its roadmap and recently implement Ethereum’s proposed identity standard ERC 725. With the ERC 725 identity standard, Origin’s DApp is said to allow users to create and control their own identity contracts in a simple interface that connects their identity to their Ethereum wallet.
Origin has recently added three key engineers to its team. These include; Yu Pan, PayPal co-founder and first employee at YouTube; Cuong Do, former head of Dropbox engineering in NYC and early engineer at YouTube; and Franck Chastagnol, former lead engineer from Dropbox, YouTube and PayPal.
Josh Fraser, Co-Founder of Origin, said they intend on removing corporate giants from the sharing economy and redistribute value to both buyers and sellers. Look out Uber.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Origin Protocol intends to remove corporate giants from the sharing economy and redistribute value to the buyers and sellers #Blockchain” quote=”Origin Protocol intends to remove corporate giants from the sharing economy and redistribute value to the buyers and sellers #Blockchain”]
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