A new white paper has been published detailing a potentially transformative protocol for initial coin offerings (ICOs).
The protocol, which would seek to produce an “equilibrium” between capped and uncapped token sales, represents a collaborative effort between ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and developer Jason Teutsch, the creator of smart contract scalability project TrueBit.
In the white paper, released today, the authors detail a system by which an ICO could respond to the actions of buyers. Specifically, buyers would submit a valuation table via a smart contract that would enable them to make purchases dynamically relative to a real-time valuation.
More simply, the new ICO protocol would give buyers the option to withdraw investment bids on tokens, while evaluating the buyer’s stake relative to the entire ICO and shifting bids accordingly.
In this way, it seeks to solve the problem of ICO sales selling out too quickly, or not at all.
While very much in early stages, it notably follows a flood of ICOs in the past few months that have alarmed industry participants while stoking equal optimism the use case could one day democratize venture funding.
On Medium, Teutsch spoke to this gap between the bigger vision and the present state, writing:
“I hope that the present foray into algorithmic game theory will encourage our community to continue to think explicitly about assumptions and goals for crowdsales as we experiment with and build upon the trustless, cryptoeconomic power of smart contracts.”
Balance via Shutterstock
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