Blockchain interoperability protocol Polkadot has acquired around $43.7 million in funding through a private token sale.
The crypto token sale, which was conducted over the course of three days from July 24 to July 27, 2020, included participation from multiple investors, who provided 3,982 Bitcoins (BTC) through 1,059 different transactions.
Investors that took part in the sale received Polkadot’s native DOT tokens, which were sold at $125 per token. US and Japanese residents, and a few other jurisdictions, were not allowed to take part in the sale due to regulatory issues or restrictions.
The Polkadot initiative was initially led by Gavin Wood, an Ethereum co-founder. Wood, like many other Ethereum co-founders such as Charles Hoskinson, have gone on to launch their own projects, because many of them were not quite satisfied with how Ethereum’s ongoing development was progressing.
Wood began working on Polkadot by establishing a company called Parity Technologies and also a non-profit entity known as the Web3 Foundation.
Polkadot’s massive $43.7 million+ token sale has come after the initiative secured $145 million in capital in 2017 and the project’s team members also sold half a million DOT tokens in 2019, without publicly sharing the exact amount raised during that particular sale.
Launched in 2016, the Polkadot project introduced its mainnet in May 2020. The initiative’s backers claim that they’ve been able to resolve the scalability and interoperability issues that Ethereum has been unable to address.
However, Ethereum continues to dominate the smart contract and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. The leading platform for developing decentralized applications (dApps) benefits from enormous network effects, because the vast majority of these so-called “decentralized” solutions have been developed, or are being built on Ethereum.
No other dApp development platform, including EOS and Tron, can claim as many ecosystem participants. It also appears that the number of Ethereum tokens launched on the leading smart contract platform will one day surpass the market cap of Bitcoin.
Avalanche, which is led by Cornell professor Emin Gün Sirer, recently acquired $42 million through a Reg D 506c public sale. Avalanche’s developers claim that it’s going to be better than Ethereum 2.0, which could go live toward the end of this year or in 2021.
The far more likely scenario that we will see in the coming years is not a replacement for Ethereum, but many other platforms like the SKALE Network which complement Ethereum’s capabilities.