Brave software now has access to over $72,900,500 in capital for their basic attention token. Investors made 600% in 6 days.

On May 31st 2017 the team behind the Brave browser launched a new digital currency, named the “Basic Attention Token”, or BAT. This was after an announcement made at Token summit on May 25th 2017. The team launched this new digital currency through what is commonly referred to as an “Initial Coin Offering”, or ICO.

By most measures, their ICO was a wild success. The team set out to raise a maximum of 156,250 ETH (ethers), worth approximately $36,000,000 USD at the time. Not only were they able to raise this amount, they did so in about 25 seconds (2 ethereum blocks).

Pre-sale economics

At the time of the sale, 1 ETH purchased 6,400 BAT tokens. This translated to about $0.0359 USD per token. There are a total of 1.5 Billion BAT, which meant that Brave was valuing its entire currency at $58,850,000 USD.

Who funded the project?

Having a quick look at the Ethereum contract that collected funds, we can see that there were a number of very large purchasers, topped off by one purchase of 20,522 ETH ($4,720,000). Not only that, one purchaser attempted to buy 45,000 ETH ($10,350,000), but their order was not fulfilled due to an execution error.

Overall, the the top 100 holders collectively own 94.94% of all BAT tokens.

Distribution of BAT token holders. The largest holder is the Brave foundation itself.

How have the backers done so far?

Recently, the BAT Token has been listed for sale on crypto currency exchanges. At the time of writing, it is currently trading at $0.245, up from the sale price of $0.0359. This represents an approximate return of 582%. Not a bad return for 6 days.

How did Brave Software do?

The market capitalization of the BAT token currently sits at $251,461,000 USD. 500,000,000 BAT tokens were reserved for the Brave developers and a community distribution fund. At current market rates, that translates to:

Community Fund: 366,350,000 BAT, or $89,755,750 B rave Development Fund: 133,650,000 BAT, or $32,744,250 — 180 day lockup

Overall, this means that Brave Software now has access to 133,650,000 BAT (development fund) +156,250 ETH (pre-sale funds) = $72,900,000 USD of capital, all without selling any equity in their startup.

More to come?

Overall, the hype in this market is extremely high. With returns so high in such short time periods, there is immense competition to participate in these ICOs when they launch. For the few lucky participants who were able to get into the BAT during the 25 second window, it appears they have few regrets. The next ICO to watch for will be civic.com, which plans to launch its ICO on June 21st 2017, and raise a maximum of $33,000,000 USD.