Cryptocurrency Investment Fund Completes $1.8 Million ICO

A digital asset investment project has netted close to $1.8 million through an initial coin offering (ICO).

The Digital Developer Fund closed its ICO this morning, raising 6,429 ETH – worth roughly $1.85 million at current prices – over a month-long period. The company behind it, based in the Cayman Islands, had previously invested in domain names through a venture dating back to 2010.

The effort is one of the latest to use cryptographic tokens to represent shares in an investment firm. According to materials published on the Digital Developers Fund website, token-bearers will receive quarterly dividends distributed through an ethereum smart contract. Any net profits generated through the fund will also be issued to token-holders.

As is the case with many ICOs, the sale was blocked to prospective buyers from the US. Other recent examples of this strategy include district0x, a blockchain-based marketplace project that raised $9 million through an ICO at the start of the month.

Token sales have accelerated in recent months, as shown by data from CoinDesk's ICO Tracker. Nearly $1.7 billion has been raised to date through the model, with more than $500 million during July alone.

That month also saw a major release from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the topic. The agency published its findings from an investigation into The DAO, the ethereum-based funding vehicle that sold $150 million worth of tokens at the-current prices, only to later collapse following a debilitating code exploit.

The SEC said that DAO tokens constitute a kind of security, and that other tokens may fall under this definition.