Galaxy Digital and Bitmain Lead AVA Project’s $12M Private Token Sale

The Avalanche Foundation, the organization behind the Emin Gün Sirer-founded blockchain protocol Avalanche, has raised $12 million in a new private token sale.

According to an announcement on June 25, the sale was led by major industry investors like Chinese mining giant Bitmain and Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital. The token sale comes ahead of the AVA mainet launch scheduled for summer 2020. 

Other prominent investors in AVA’s token sale included San Francisco-based venture capital firm Initialized Capital, NGC Ventures and Dragonfly Capital. Dozens of other individuals have participated in the private sale as well, AVA Labs said.

Public sale follows private round

Following the private sale, the Avalanche Foundation will also conduct a public sale in accordance with the United States’ federal financial regulations.

Within the sale, all investors must represent “accredited investors” as defined under Rule 501 of Regulation D. Otherwise, the investors must not be a “U.S. Person” as defined by Regulation S under the Securities Act and meet other suitability standards. The upcoming sale, which includes registration and Know Your Customer process, is scheduled to run for at least two weeks, starting from July 8, AVA Labs said.

AVA project’s native token is called the Avalanche token 

By participating in the token sales, the investors are purchasing the rights to own a certain amount of Avalanche tokens (AVAX) that will be issued at the mainnet launch in summer. At the launch, 50% of the fixed cap of 720 million AVAX will be issued, a spokesperson at AVA Labs told Cointelegraph.

The Avalanche token is the native token of the Avalanche platform and it’s not pegged to any asset. AVAX will be used to secure the AVA network through staking, provide a basic unit of account between AVA subnetworks as well as pay network fees, AVA Labs said.

The private sale is the second fund raise after February’s $6 million Series A round

The latest token sale follows the successful launch of AVA’s “Denali Testnet” that offered each validator to earn up to 2,000 AVAX. According to AVA Labs, the testnet had over 1,000 full block producing nodes actively staking and participating in the consensus protocol.

The new fundraise adds to AVA’s first $6 million funding round completed in February 2019. The Series A funding round involved investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain and MetaStable. 

Sirer, a computer scientist and professor at Cornell University, initiated the AVA Labs project in 2019. Referred to as the “Internet of blockchains,” the Avalanche protocol is designed to provide an open-source platform and a layer 1 protocol for launching decentralized finance applications and enterprise blockchain solutions.

In recent news, Turkish lira stablecoin issuer BiLira said that its coin is being built on the AVA blockchain.