AngelList Spin-Off CoinList Announces First Token Sale of 2019

Token launch platform CoinList is rolling out its first offering of 2019.

Announced Thursday, Ocean Protocol, a decentralized data-sharing protocol, is aiming to raise $8 million at 25 cents a token through the CoinList platform. The sale starts March 1 and is open to accredited U.S. investors and international buyers.

It’s the first token sale on CoinList since July 2018, when Origin Protocol set out to raise $6.6 million. CoinList, an AngelList spin-off that claims to offer an SEC-compliant issuing platform, says regulatory jitters in the marketplace have contributed to a token-sale slowdown.

“Some sales happened on our platform in the middle of last year, and then we found that effectively no high-quality potential clients wanted to run public sales at the end of 2018,” CoinList co-founder and president Andy Bromberg told CoinDesk. “What we're seeing now is an array of great issuers looking to do sales in early 2019.”

CoinList has always maintained there is a compliant way to run token sales in the U.S., a point it reasserted with a blog post following SEC actions against Airfox and Paragon last November. According to the company, 50 teams have already used the platform to raise $450 million.

For its part, Ocean’s ambition is to democratize access to artificial intelligence and the datasets that make it powerful.

"The time is right to kick start a new data economy,” Bruce Pon, Ocean Protocol’s founder, said in a statement, adding:

“Our token launch sets us in the right direction to continue to build so that more people can unlock the value of data, continuously expanding the effect of the data economy."

The protocol is supported by a Singapore-based non-profit that raised 16 million euros in a pre-launch token sale in March 2018. Pon told CoinDesk the token wasn't released at the time so as to comply with U.S securities laws.

"We can only release the token (OCEAN) when there is utility value – which happens to be now," Pon said. "The old token ticker OCN got taken by a different project so we went with OCEAN instead."

CoinList’s Bromberg expects token sales on the site to ramp up significantly in 2019. “Now that the market has calmed down, top teams are ready to begin distributing their token and raising money from a broader audience,” he told CoinDesk.

Brady Dale contributed reporting.

Bruce Pon image via Ocean Protocol/YouTube