暗网吃瓜

Morning Report:听The Filecoin ICO, also backed by traditional venture capital firms, closes with just under $258 million in funds raised. How much money is that?

The Filecoin ICO is in the books. The results of the raise amounted to $52 million from venture capitalists and $205.8 million from normal channels听. The total makes Filecoin the largest ICO to date.

As 暗网吃瓜 News noted before, questions abound with Filecoin, including when the distributed storage network will, in fact, launch. The coin’s website, as of the time of writing, notes that its token sale has ended; however, there is no obvious launch information.

That status matches what in August: “[T]he tokens being bought in this sale won鈥檛 be delivered until the Filecoin Network launches. Currently, there is no launch date set.”

From a normal investing perspective, this is odd鈥攁t least in terms of when a company should raise external capital. But let’s ask ourselves a different question: just how much money is $258 million?

• More than either Cloudera or Carvana raised in their IPOs this year, during which each raised a more modest $225 million.
• About 4.4 times as much as Microsoft raised in its IPO, including secondary sales but sans the greenshoe option, unadjusted for inflation.
• 5.2 times as much as through its Seed, Angel, Series A, and Series B.
• Around 2.2 times as much as through its own Series B.
• More than Freestyle Capital has ($230.21 million).

That’s an attempt to show how $258 million compares to early-stage funding, super late-stage funding, and even venture firms that run seed-ish funds. To summarize: $258 million is a听lot of money.

What is interesting in the case of Filecoin is that the bet is placed and the wheel is spinning. We’ll see.

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