Written by Hunter Gebron

On Monday Jun-26–2017 03:37:06 PM +UTC, at block #3933451 the adToken contribution period began. We set a hard cap of 33,333 ETH. When the dust settled, the entire contribution period lasted only 23 seconds, and the launch was over in 1 block with a total of $7,697,923 USD raised at a $230.94 USD per ETH valuation. We thank everyone who participated!

Mike Goldin, a lead engineer at ConsenSys and the chief architect of the adChain white paper, wrote the sale contracts for the token launch. As he sat watching millions of dollars pour in through the code he created, he was a blended mixture of both jubilation and terror. Well done Mike! You did a fantastic job, and we could not have done it without you.

33,333 ETH was raised to fund adChain while 2,689 transactions totaling 368,171.22 ETH were sent to the sale contract for a grand total of $110,451,366.78 USD (at current $300 ETH valuation). That is an impressive number, and we are humbled by the overwhelming support from the community!

Many have said to us, “Why such a low cap?”

We feel that the 33,333 ETH raised to fund adChain is both adequate and responsible. It is the amount we needed as a team to reach our product roadmap goals. We believe our mission is critical to the ad-supported internet and we are eager to bring novel blockchain applications to the digital advertising industry.

The adChain saga began two years ago when we started looking at the Bitcoin blockchain as a potential solution to solve some of the glaring problems we faced working in Ad Tech. But ultimately, we ran into the same issues that Vitalik did when he was building applications on the Bitcoin blockchain. It was not conducive for smart contracts. So we shelved our idea.

Vitalik, on the other hand, went on to create Ethereum, the world’s first Turing complete blockchain.

Thanks to Vitalik and the Ethereum community at large, we were able to refocus our efforts back to the blockchain. We reached out to ConsenSys in early 2016 and formed a partnership that ultimately led to adChain. We thank ConsenSys for all of their hard work in making adChain a reality. Trying to build adChain without ConsenSys would have been an impossible task. In our opinion, they are truly the best in the biz.

We understand that the overwhelming demand for adToken coupled with our relatively ‘low’ market cap compared to other projects in the space meant that for many people they were unable to contribute. We apologize.

Our hard cap was set many months ago, and we decided to stay grounded amidst the token madness that we as a community currently find ourselves in. We believe that in order for Ethereum to maintain its ability to self-govern itself, certain projects will need to temper their enthusiasm when it comes to raising unnecessary amounts of ETH. We could have raised $100 million dollars. But we simply do not need that amount of money.

Of course, there are drawbacks to doing a capped sale with a fixed number of tokens. We acknowledge that.

Vitalik in a recent blog post posited that,

“Nearly every significant sale, including Brave’s Basic Attention Tokens, Gnosis, upcoming sales such as Bancor, and older ones such as Maidsafe and even the Ethereum sale itself, has been met with a substantial amount of criticism, all of which points to a simple fact: so far, we have still not yet discovered a mechanism that has all, or even most, of the properties that we would like.”

We are sure there will be solutions put forth by projects in the future to solve the token sale dilemma. Many incredibly smart people like Nick Johnson are working on better token sale models. It’s only a matter of time.

As of now, we are focusing on building adChain and the user interface that will accompany it. We recently hosted LA Ad Tech in our Santa Monica HQ and opened our doors to the digital advertising community to speak about adChain and blockchain technology. Many influential members of the community were there asking high and low-level questions about how adChain will work. The excitement level around this project is very high.

Stay tuned for more announcements to come!