Lendingblock, the open exchange for cryptocurrency loans, has snapped up £10m via an initial coin offering (ICO).
The money was raised across three stages: a £500k private sale, a £4.3m allocated pre-sale and a £5.2m public main sale.
Linda Wang, a co-founder of the still-to-be-launched business, told AltFi that investors were offered “diminishing bonuses” throughout the process in the form of bonus coins on top of those they paid for. These bonuses were most generous at the private sale stage, and gradually dwindled with each passing phase of the ICO.
The fundraise carried a soft cap of £5m and a hard cap of £10m, which was hit at 8:20am this morning. In exchange for their investment, investors received LND, the blockchain-linked token created by the Lendingblock platform.
“Once our platform becomes live in Q3 they [investors] will be able to use our token to borrow or lend cryptocurrencies and pay the interest in our coin,” explained Wang. The Lendingblock platform allows individuals and institutions to pledge their cryptocurrencies as collateral in order to borrow other forms of crypto, with lenders able to earn interest (paid in LND) on their holdings.
Wang told AltFi that ICO investors will also be able to trade their LND tokens on various exchanges. She explained that Lendingblock would be listing the token on three exchanges in May, making it possible to trade the coin. Those exchanges will be HitBTC, IDEX and ForkDelta.
“The value of the token will be an aggregate of its value on all the exchanges we’re listed on,” she said.
The money will be used to fund product development, team hiring and strategic investment in other projects, as well as for appointing advisors, incentivising staff and business development. A full breakdown of the use of funds may be found in section 8.4 of the firm’s 32-page white paper.
In March, Lendingblock revealed that it had appointed former Funding Circle co-founder Andrew Mullinger as an advisor to the business. The platform is due to launch in August this year.
