Bitpanda, Europe’s most popular crypto-trading platform, has announced that it raised more than €4.5 million with its recent ICO, well short of its €13 million target but still a record for an Austrian ICO.
Bitpanda CEO Eric Demuth described the result as “a great success” and argued that the ICO was meant to build “something sustainable & useful” rather than “one of those fancy bling bling marketing projects.”
The Bitpanda ICO is to fund development of Pantos, the exchange’s answer to “an increasingly fragmented digital currency market”. The project aims to bring “all major blockchain platforms closer together” and so “set new standards for decentralised cross-chain token transfers”.
Bitpanda is working with the Vienna University of Technology to build a “prototype with the Pantos Token that should be accessible to everyone.” Though currently not possible, they plan “a decentralized transfer from one blockchain to another.” In the first iteration, Pantos tokens will be made transferable across the Bitcoin, Ethereum, Waves, Komodo, Lisk and NEM blockchains.
Co-founder Paul Klanschek said that the company had “started the ICO at the worst time in the past few months. Everything was going down.” Under those circumstances, “four million euros are not a bad result.”
Around 7,800 different investors participated in the sale, between them giving the equivalent of 616 BTC. Despite failing to achieve its target, for Demuth the project will now benefit from “wide distribution.” With nearly 8,000 ICO participants and “over 30,000 users who have claimed the Airdrop”, the project appears to have got off to a healthy start.
