A Swiss firm broke crypto records by raising $36 million – in just over one minute. A look behind the crypto provider's lightning-fast coin offering.
Singularity Net's initial coin offering, or ICO, is already being dubbed «Gone in 60 Seconds,» after the 1974 action drama, and the 2000 Nicolas Cage remake – it is the quickest issue and take-up of a digital currency ever, according to crypto observers.
The Swiss-based crypto start-up raised $36 million last month by selling its digital AGI token. The fund-raising took just 66 seconds to hit the cap set by Singularity Net.
The record ICO was chaperoned by Swiss crypto currency firm Bitcoin Suisse, which is trying to win domestic banks as clients. Demand for the coin far outstripped supply, according to Singularity Net: 20,000 investors were prepared to put up $360 million more, the firm wrote in a blog post.
Sophia > Trump
The additional funds would make Singularity Net's ICO not only the fastest, but also the largest fund-raising. Last year, ICOs raised roughly $3.5 billion, according to business and economy portal «Business Insider».
The largest ICOs last year were U.S.-based Filecoin with $257 million, Sirin Labs' $157 million – and of course $232 million raised by Switzerland's Tezos Foundation, which has erupted in a bitter dispute.
Why is Singularity Net so popular? The firm, a spin-off of American tech company Hanson Robotics, has centered its activities around the hot theme of artificial intelligence, which it wants to built a blockchain-based marketplace for. Investors and developers can feed their designs into the platform to match up with customers like Hanson, who have the wherewithal to build the technology into robots.
(Image: Youtube)
Hanson research boss Ben Goertzel (pictured above) – also the CEO of Singularity Net – has already built Sophia, a robot which believes she could do a better job than U.S. president Donald Trump, and who has said she wants to destroy humans.
