In the past, pop culture was governed by a cycle of 20 years. Today, the cycle is closer to 10, maybe even 5.
Crypto has been going through a similar experience, but now it is ICOs turn.
Seven years ago, a tidal wave of public token sales hit Ethereum, with over 2,000 separate offerings raking in more than $10 billion — almost two-thirds coming in the first three months of 2018 alone.
One clear indication that Initial Coin Offerings are returning is the fact that Corn’s token sale in recent weeks was oversubscribed seven-fold within the first couple of hours. They had to turn away thousands investors.
The corn industry is combining two popular stories from previous cycles: public tokens sales and yield farming. The first year it was introduced as the “super yield network,” An Ethereum layer-2 on top of the Arbitrum Orbit stack, with a Bitcoin touch.
It’s built to use tokenized wrapped bitcoin, BTCN, as its native asset — to stake, pay gas and otherwise be put to work across its budding DeFi ecosystem.
Corn’s ICO took place on the MiCA compliant platform Legion. Nearly 4300 investors requested allocations of $69 million, and the team accepted $8.3 from 700 investors.
Legion allows projects and investors to connect based on merit. Participants (excluding UK and US retail) are required to first KYC. But the value is in connecting their GitHub, X account and crypto wallets.
It allows them to give priority to investors active in cryptocurrency, regardless of whether they appear onchain or code.
“We thought: ‘How do we create something that’s fair and open for small and big, and how do we get very targeted with our token distribution, so we can be in a place to say we have 1,000 or 2,000 long-term committed investors well before the token goes live?” Chris Spadafora is the Corn founder. He told me this over the weekend.
“That’s what drove us to go down this path, but it wasn’t an easy decision and it required a lot of work to kind of coordinate all the different groups.”
Those parties included existing Corn backers from its seed and venture rounds last year — venture capital firms Polychain Capital, GSR, Laser Digital and more.
“Anyone that participated in this round went through an identical process,” Spadafora said. “They had to onboard to Legion, they had to apply, and then we had to accept them.”
The kicker, according to Spadafora, is now that all those funds have been onboarded, the next project that wants to launch on Legion has a direct line and access to some of the biggest funds in the world — along with another 10,000 or 100,000 people on Legion that can invest at the same terms.
But if ICOs were to really return, improvements would be needed. ICOs of 2017 and 2018 have been opaque, and skewed painfully towards insiders. Corn’s offering, on the other hand, did not have any side letters and no undisclosed secret deals.
“There was one contract, it was loaded. If you wanted to invest $1,000 or a million dollars, it was the same deal. Take it or get the fuck out of here,” Spadafora remarked that this kind of attitude is exactly what ICOs need.
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