ICO Team To Keep Their Share of Tokens Locked Up for an Extra Seven Years

The team behind an ICO project worth millions of dollars has announced that instead of being being paid with their project’s reserve tokens over a three-year period, they will receive the money over ten years instead.

$9.5 million

The project in question is called Nebulas, which is based in Beijing. It raised $60 million in its ICO in December. Its token is called NAS, and it has a market capitalisation of $65.9 million, according to coinmarketcap.com.

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The original roadmap planned for 20 million NAS tokens, or 20 percent of the total, to be reserved for the management team and gradually released over the next three years. At the current price this is worth approximately $9.5 million.

The change was announced via a blog post  published in Medium. It says that the decision was made “in order to ensure the realization of the long-term vision of Nebulas”. It also commits to publishing the addresses of the undistributed NAS tokens, which make up 55 percent of the total. There are currently 45.5 million in circulation.

Nebulas Rank Force Devotion

According to its white paper, Nebulas is a “value-based blockchain operating system and search engine”. The purpose of the project is to solve three problems that it has identified with blockchain technology: how to measure the value of blockchain applications, how to evolve and develop an existing blockchain, and how to create a  “healthy long term ecosystem”.

It measures value by using a measurement system called the ‘Nebulas Rank’, which uses “liquidity, speed, width and depth of capital” as a basis for the values. Nebulas also pays developers for making good quality applications, a system which it calls the Developer Incentive Protocol.

The ‘Nebulas Force’ allows developers to adapt existing applications by granting them access to certain areas of smart contract code.

It also intends to launch a search engine for decentralised applications, which will again be based on its ranking system.

The blockchain runs on a consensus algorithm called ‘Proof of Devotion’. This is similar to Proof of Importance, which prioritises nodes according to the number of tokens held + rate of activity, but has the added factor of Nebulas Rank to measure importance.

According to the blog post, the blockchain currently holds “more than 10,000 smart contracts, more than 230,000 mainnet accounts, and almost 6,900 DApps.”

This approach stands out in the get-rich-quick landscape of cryptocurrency fundraising to which we have become accustomed.

Regarding the decision to postpone payment, marketing director Becky Lu told CoinDesk: “We just want our team to focus on our technical vision. It’s not an easy decision for everyone because the blockchain industry is a very innovative industry and still has a lot of risk. I think that shows our determination.”