In June 2017, the amount of money raised by cryptocurrency and blockchain startups via Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) overtook early stage venture capital (VC) funding for internet companies. At $550 million, the amount of money raised by ICOs was almost double that of angel and early VC funding, which was just under $300 million. According to data from CoinDesk, the total amount of money raised by ICOs in 2017 was a staggering $3.5 billion, more than 10 times the figure that was recorded in 2016.
However, with the launch of more and more ICOs in today’s market, comes the problem of legitimacy. Most coin offerings tend to attract investors who are more concerned with profits and not the actual technology behind the coin itself – relegating the cryptocurrency trading market to a gambling platform. Furthermore, the lack of transparency and regulation in the world of ICOs means that a lot of the coin offerings are outright scams or Ponzi schemes, as stated by the CEOs of Ethereum and Ripple.
Introducing Holo
Holo is a decentralized cloud hosting platform that enables fully-functional distributed applications to serve mainstream Internet users. It also provides a massively scalable crypto-accounting infrastructure that is required to host these applications at enormous volumes of usage. The organization itself is incorporated in Gibraltar, where there is a clear, definitive, and pointed existing framework for ICOs and cryptocurrencies.
Initial Community Offering
Acknowledging the pitfalls and imperfections in the modern world of ICOs, Holo sets out to remedy these flaws by launching an Initial Community Offering (ICO) as opposed to the more commonly known Initial Coin Offering. Holo’s ICO is a sale that is inclusive, meaningful and holistic – it ensures that future Holo hosts and users will be able to purchase Holo credits without having to worry that they will be pushed out by a few people buying all available credits within minutes. The Holo ICO will also have a reasonable cap on the amounts of credits that will be sold instead of just raising as much as possible.
In an exclusive interview with the Lead of Holo's ICO Project, Jean Russell, she revealed that the main objective of Holo’s ICO is to create a long-lasting community of developers and hosts who share the same desire to empower the Internet.
“We are calling it an initial community offering rather than a coin offering because for us, this about kick-starting the ecosystem,” Russell said. “Our ICO is different from the conventional ICO because of its unique way of determining the total supply for our currency, which is based on an estimated year of hosting. That estimate is calculated from the hosting and development offering in the crowdfunding campaign. If our ecosystem of developers and hosts is bigger, we can release more funds into the ICO to fuel the economy and reward hosts for sharing capacity. Thus, our currency being asset-backed and is accountable to the demand for it.”
Another interesting fact about Holo is that although they offer credits that can be exchanged for services in the form of ERC20 tokens (A.K.A. smart contracts), their cryptocurrency is actually a crypto-accounting engine that uses no coins and no tokens. Certainly, the conceptualization of the Holo community in question involves a purchase using Ether, the currency native to the Ethereum blockchain. However, almost as quickly as they’re purchased, these tokens are destroyed and replaced with Holo fuel credits.
“We don't use a token or a coin,” Russell explained. “We use a mutual credit system that is tracked with double-entry-accounting. This is also significant in our efficiency, as both parties must agree to a transaction, and it is recorded on both chains. This is highly efficient while also being secure. Furthermore, double entry accounting means we can do tens of thousands of transactions in a minute. In fact, the system gets better as it scales. This is a crucial design difference between us and others (ICOs)."
The Holo ICO * will commence on the 9th of January 2018 and is scheduled to run for a month until the 8th of February 2018. Visit the official Holo ICO website for more information.
- The ICO was moved to the 23rd of January.