An Interesting Way to ‘Cap’ the ICO

Dfinity completed its seed ICO yesterday with a total amount raised at 3.9 million CHF. The project had a soft-cap for the ICO at 1 million CHF and an additional 24 hours from this time before close. This soft cap idea is a new one in crypto ICOs. At the end of the ICO, i.e. 24 hours after the soft cap was reached, the ICO closed with around 3.9 million CHF total raised. The soft cap of 1 million CHF was hit in only 75 minutes from the start of the Dfinity ICO

Dfinity tried an interesting way to cap the ICO. Instead of a hard cap, i.e. the ICO closes the moment the Ethereum contract receives the maximum amount of money defined in the contract, Dfinity opted for a ‘soft cap’. The soft cap was implemented as follows – the ICO closes 24 hours after the soft cap is reached. This has an advantage that investors don’t need to wake up at ungodly hours to meet a 15 minute ICO window, which happened with some hot tokens last year like the FirstBlood token. Such ‘insta-sale ICOs’ are bad for the project as they tend to concentrate the tokens in the hands of a few whales instead of distributing them widely to the community.

Of course, the flip side of this is that investors don’t really know the price of the token they are getting until the end of the ICO, which makes return calculations hard. For example, if investors place a risk-adjusted value of $2 million in this round, there is no way to know whether to invest or not, because the ICO might raise more or less than that amount. With a 24 hour window, it was at least mitigated though.

Blockchain Nervous System

Dfinity has created some interesting ideas, most notably the Blockchain Nervous System. This allows the token holders to vote and change important economic parameters. It also is a back-stop against bad behavior, or bad bugs, like preventing potential The DAO type situations. If the majority decide, they can pretty much do anything, although proposals come at a cost. This has a very different dynamic to the ‘code is law’ principle followed by Bitcoin and Ethereum Classic. It is a softer version of that.

Although Dfinity claims not to compete with Ethereum, it offers a Turing complete language to write smart contracts and applications in. The technology developed with mutually benefit Ethereum and Dfinity, but there is also definitely a competitive element. Dfinity will provide value to the token holders by bringing in projects and apps being built on it, which would otherwise have been built on Ethereum, likely. Dfinity also believes that some of the technology being developed by the team will help Ethereum. Collaboration among crypto projects is always welcome as it moves the whole ecosystem forward.