Blockchain Startup With Disney Roots Completes $13.7 Million ICO

Dragonchain, the blockchain startup that began as a Disney prototype, has raised approximately $13.7 million in an initial coin offering (ICO).

According to the Dragonchain site, roughly 30,521 ether and 622.47 bitcoin were contributed during the two-stage token sale, which began with a pre-sale in August and ended with the conclusion of a public sale that concluded earlier this week. The pre-sale itself raised approximately $1.4 million (152.25 BTC and 2357.53 ETH).

In statements, representatives for the firm said that the funding will go toward development as well as establishing a market for the firm's Dragon token.

"Our goal was to determine market price of a Dragon and raise enough to deliver our roadmap," CEO Joe Roets told CoinDesk in an email.

Dragonchain will distribute all of the 238,421,940 coins designated for the public sale proportionally to the value in bitcoin of all the funds contributed in the public offering (contributions in ether will be valued as bitcoin at the exchange rate of the time of contribution). The distribution will occur after audits are complete.

There were 5,388 transactions in the sale, with a median contribution of $290.77 (the largest was $1,046,754.33), the startup said, though it added it doesn't have a definite figure on the total number of contributors.

The sale was open to anyone in the world, and it did not limit the sale to accredited investors nor require any form of identification to participate, according to the site’s FAQ.

As Business Insider reported, Dragonchain started as an internal project at Disney in 2014, until the company dropped the project in 2016 and open-sourced its work. Disney is no longer involved in Dragonchain.

Dragon sculpture image from Shutterstock.