In the world of crypto-currencies—the most famous of which is bitcoin—the hottest trend is what’s called an “initial coin offering,” in which companies sell crypto-currency tokens to their supporters as a method of crowdfunding.
How hot is it? On Wednesday, a startup called Brave launched a coin offering to fund a new web browser and raised the equivalent of $35 million in about 30 seconds, according to CoinDesk.
Brave is the brainchild of Brendan Eich, the co-founder of the Mozilla Foundation, maker of the original Mozilla browser. Eich’s new web browser is designed so that users can make micropayments to web publishers they like using crypto-currency, based on how many articles they read.
We are pleased with the sale, and we’re looking forward to disrupting digital advertising and building a user-centric platform for supporting the Web, Eich told CoinDesk.
The Brave browser’s payment system uses what are called Basic Attention Tokens, whose value is based on the crypto-currency known as Ethereum, a popular alternative to bitcoin. Eich has said his company plans to release the code behind the tokens as open source so that anyone can build publishing systems or services that use them for payment.
Although the use of crypto-currencies puts a new spin on it, the history of micropayments for content is littered with failures, including a litany of strange-sounding digital would-be payment systems such as Beenz and Flooz.