Hong Kong company raises $185m in record-breaking initial coin offering

The hot streak for initial coin offerings (ICOs), which is a way for the public to buy new cryptocurrencies, continues. Hong Kong-based company Block.one announced today that it has raised about US$185 million (ETH 652,902) for its Ethereum-based EOS tokens.
The startup’s main product, also called EOS, is a software that allows developers to build blockchain applications on top of it. EOS can support hundreds of thousands of transactions a second without charging users any fee, the company claims. That’s more than the 24,000 transactions that Visa handles every second.
Like many ICOs, Block.one doesn’t have a working prototype to show to the public. Investors decide whether to back the currency based on a whitepaper produced by the firm. Because of the nature of ICOs, plus the fact that it’s unregulated, there are concerns that the ICO is a bubble waiting to burst.

To Block.one’s advantage though, one of its founders is CTO Dan Larimer, a cryptocurrency veteran who’s responsible for projects like BitShares, a decentralized exchange, and Steem, a Reddit-like website where users can make money by posting content.
Block.one looks set to raise even more from its sale, which has been running for five days and still has 350 days remaining. It has sold 20 percent of the tokens on offer.
The previous ICO record holder, Bancor, which raised about US$153 million, is a platform for users to launch their own blockchain tokens.