$100 Million: Putin Advisor Targets Big Raise for Bitcoin Mining ICO

An advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to raise as much as $100 million in an initial coin offering (ICO).

The funding effort for the "Russian Mining Company" was revealed this week by Dmitry Marinichev, who serves as the internet ombudsman to Putin's office.

According to a presentation published in tandem with the unveiling, the team behind the effort is planning to tap as much as 20 megawatts to power their mining farm, using chips developed domestically. Bitcoin mining is an energy intensive process by which new transactions are added to the blockchain, creating new tokens – 12.5 BTC, or roughly $42,000 at current prices – as a reward for the miner.

The presentation details how the sale will take place in two parts: a pre-sale that began yesterday and will last until August 25. From there, a second-stage sale will occur between August 28 and September 2.

The ICO is the first planned release on a new service jointly created by the Party for Growth, a Russian political partner, and the developers of the Waves blockchain platform. The initiative was first unveiled in June.

Russian billionaire and party chairman Boris Titov, according a new blog post, remarked during a presser yesterday that the platform would act as a screening mechanism for projects hoping to launch ICOs.

He told attendees:

"...within the framework of the ICO-generator we will conduct the initial selection of projects, their legal and economic expertise, after which investors in the ICO market [can] be sure that these companies are working under our umbrella and not crooks."

Bloomberg

, which attended the press conference, reports that Marinichev struck an ambitious note about the mining venture's prospects.

"Russia has the potential to reach up to 30 percent share in global cryptocurrency mining in the future," he was quoted as saying.

If the offering does raise the target amount, it would represent one of an increasingly growing number of big-ticket ICOs that have occurred in recent months. According to data from CoinDesk's ICO Tracker, more than $1.6 billion has been raised through the ICO model to date.

Image via Wikimedia