Bluzelle, the decentralized database provider, has closed its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) having raised $19.5m in order to develop its decentralized database technology and fill the missing piece in the decentralized internet. The sale was unlike ‘FOMO ICOs’ where buyers are given little time to get their orders in and ‘Fear Of Missing Out’ tactics are used to ensure a mad dash to sell out. Instead, buyers were assembled into groups and given 24 hours to make their purchases.
On day one, 360 buyers took part, which was an 85% turnout for Group 1. On day two, 6,698 buyers took part, which was a 95% turnout for Group 2. By day three, there were just under 2 million tokens left of the 165 million made available for sale and both previous groups were able to take part on a first-come-first-served basis. This final round sold out in under 5 seconds.
In total, 500 million tokens had been generated, so the 165 million that were sold represented 33% of the total. Investors included Kenetic Capital, Hashed, Kryptonite 1 and 8 Decimal Capital.
Bluzelle CEO Pavel Bains, who is set to speak at the NEO DevCon in San Francisco later this month, said:
“Selling out the crowdsale is a huge milestone in the growth of our company and our journey to deliver a product that will be a key component of the new, better Internet. We have been into this technology for years and the CEOs and CTOs we work with are just as enthusiastic as us about the product, technology and the future. With this funding, we will now be able to bring our decentralized database to everyone.”
Bluzelle’s product fills a major missing piece in the decentralized internet because it provides data storage and management that hasn’t been available up to now. While the need for file storage systems is being served by the likes of Filecoin and Storj, dApp developers also need data storage & management systems that are flexible enough to allow fast and simple data queries if they are to continue building the full range of services that are possible on the decentralized internet. Bluzelle is the decentralized database that solves this problem.
The company’s impressive advisor list demonstrates how significant the blockchain community considers this technology will be. It includes Brian Fox, creator of GNU Bash, Alex Leverington, one of the original Core Ethereum developers, Prashant Malik, co-creator of Apache Cassandra and Ryan Fugger, the original creator of Ripple.
Bluzelle, which was founded in Canada in July 2014 used to focus only on payment systems. However, it relocated to Singapore in February 2016 to take advantage of Asia’s growth potential and provide blockchain infrastructure for on-premise deployment to clients that include AIA, Maybank and Temenos.
In August 2017, it raised $1.5 million in a Series A funding round that was backed by venture capital firms Global Brain, LUN Partners Capital and True Global Ventures. In October, the company was named in Forrester’s ‘Vendor Landscape: Blockchain Technology Providers in Asia Pacific’ report. Bluzelle is also a recipient of technology pioneer by the World Economic Forum.
