Just four days in and already $200M Tezos crowdfund becomes largest ICO to date

The record for biggest initial coin offering has been broken again after just a few days.

New crowdfunded blockchain startup Tezos began its “initial coin offering” crowdfunding campaign four days ago and it’s already making records. Since July 1, the ICO has raised over $213 million — $140 million in Bitcoin and $73 million in Ethereum at their current valuation — making this the largest blockchain ICO to date.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain startups have seen a long trend of using currency crowd sales to raise funding to get starter funds. The previous funding record was set by Block.One, developer of the blockchain platform EOS.IO, which raised $185 million at the end of June. That record toppled the previous ICO by Bancor in mid-June, which raised funds exceeding $153 million.

Other notable cryptocurrency crowd sales recently include $35 million raised for Brave, a privacy-enhanced browser developed by former Mozilla Foundation Chief Executive Officer Brendan Eich; $5.2 million raised by Humaniq, financial services blockchain company; and $544,000 raised by Voxelus for virtual-reality tokens.

The ICO from Tezos, developed by Dynamic Ledger Solutions Inc., ICO has no cap, meaning there is no limit to how many coins can be sold. With eight days to go this means that the company is set to raise even more.

Currently, there are two ways to contribute to the crowdfund: through the Tezos crowdfund site and by way of Bitcoin Suisse AG. Contributors can pay with Bitcoin, Ethereum, euros, U.S. dollars, British pounds, Swiss francs, Danish krones and Singapore dollars. According to the crowdfunding documentation, contributors will receive the Tezos cryptocurrency, called Tez, or XTZ. Owners of Tez will be able to participate in the Tezos ecosystem and use its services and trade Tez for other cryptocurrencies on exchanges.

As for what Tezos delivers that has people so interested: The company has designed a blockchain platform, a distributed cryptographic secured ledger, with a self-governing mechanism that allows participants to amend its protocol with consensus-driven programming.

The company calls it “a self-amending crypto-ledger” in the Tezos white paper, and “a seed protocol defining a procedure for stakeholders to approve amendments to the protocol, including amendments to the voting procedure itself.”

The Tezos blockchain protocol is based on a pure proof-of-stake system, where block creators are deterministically chosen by how much wealth they have in the system. This differs from the way the Bitcoin protocol works. That uses proof-of-work, where block creators – known as “miners” – must solve highly complex mathematical equations to generate a block and also receive a reward. There is no reward for block creation in a proof-of-stake system, but block creators – known as “minters” as in coin production or “forgers” in the blacksmith sense – do receive transaction fees.

Tezos also designed its blockchain to act as a solid foundation for smart contracts that can automatically enforce complex rules. To do this, the blockchain implements the OCaml language, a functional language with an unambiguous syntax and semantic, chosen for its emphasis on performance and runtime safety.

“We feel we’ve built an appealing seed protocol,” the company wrote in the white paper. “However, Tezos’s true potential lies in putting the stakeholders in charge of deciding on a protocol that they feel best serves them.”