Today, Republic Protocol announced the completion of their $30 million dollar REN token ICO. According to their official statements:
Along with retail investors, the participants above are betting big on a way to execute large trades without spooking the market. At least, that's the argument advanced by Taiyang Zhang, CEO of Republic Protocol, who sees the project as a trustless alternative system for current cryptocurrency trading.
Zhang admits we can't really know until the platform is live, and that it can be argued both ways, but his company has been studying the issue.
"We do have a paper coming out on the impact of price exchanges," he said
This concerns me. According to Republic, their Staten would allow a trader to place a large buy/sell order anonymously. Republic's system would them break this order into smaller, manageable trades at the original trade price, accepting trades that meet the requirements and then those that don't, with only information about the trades that actually happened being recorded. They are calling this a Dark Pool. This concept bothers me.
I can understand the idea behind this. An investor wishing to dump, say 200,000 SBD or STEEM on the market at all once could have serious implications for the coins market performance.
At the same time, it also could allow for disreputable ICO's an out, disposing of page amounts of crypto nearly anonymously, without causing a market disruption that could tip investors off.
I'm torn on this. What do you all think?
Peace