Bitcoin.com raises $33.6 million through private token sale

The wallet provider and exchange Bitcoin.com raised $33.6 million in a private sale of the VERSE token, The Block reports.

Participants in the token sale included Digital Strategies, KuCoin Ventures, Blockchain.com, ViaBTC Capital, Redwood City Ventures, 4SV, BoostX Ventures, as well as Roger Ver, Jihan Wu, and David Wachsman as private investors.

The company describes VERSE as an inter-network utility token and an ERC-20 governance asset. Its functions at Bitcoin.com have been likened to the platform coins Crypto.com (CRO), Binance (BNB) and FTX (FTT).

The issuance will total 210 billion VERSE over seven years in seven equal tranches.

15% of tokens will go to the project team, 34% to the developers’ fund, 35% presumably will go to ecosystem incentive programs. 16% of VERSE’s issuance is allocated for sale. A public token sale of 12.6 billion tokens (6%) is planned for June 2022.

Current company products include a non-custodial wallet, a crypto exchange service, and a news site. Bitcoin.com counts more than 4 million active users per month, and 30 million registered wallets.

In recent months token sales have been used to raise funds by projects such as NFT platform Quidd ($5 million) and DeFi protocol Panther Protocol ($22 million). In the first case, the sale was private, and in the second — public.