From the highly anticipated public offering ICO platform to the current decline, what has happened to CoinList, the old new coin subscription platform? This article will explore.
Summary:
The US OFAC accuses “violation of Russian sanctions”, CoinList pays a fine of 1.21 million pounds for settlement
Background:
CoinList launches multi-chain “Staking Fund”, but charges a 15% fee and initially only supports ETH and Near
Table of Contents:
Overview of CoinList
Who is CEO Andy Bromberg?
Some Projects with High Returns (2020-2021)
Solana Blockchain
NEAR Blockchain
FLOW Blockchain
MINA Zero-Knowledge Proof Blockchain
Celo Blockchain (now L2)
Projects in the Decline Phase (2021-Present)
Casper Blockchain
Axelar Cross-Chain
Ondo RWA Protocol
NYM Privacy Blockchain
Project Galaxy (now renamed Galxe) NFT Infrastructure Protocol
CyberConnect Social Protocol
NEON Solana EVM Compatible Solution
Chainflip Cross-Chain Trading Protocol
Archway Blockchain
Subsquid Zero-Knowledge Cross-Chain Data Query
zkLink Cross-Chain DEX based on Zero-Knowledge Proof
Projects to be Launched this Year
Nibiru Blockchain
Meson Decentralized Physical Network
The once glorious CoinList is no longer what it used to be, and its wealth effect and brand reputation have greatly diminished. From the highly anticipated public offering platform, it has now declined. What has happened to CoinList?
CoinList was originally founded by renowned angel investor Naval Ravikant, who is also the founder of the US equity crowdfunding platform AngelList. Many years ago, the global sensation Uber completed its crowdfunding financing on this platform. When Ravikant found that the blockchain was in its early stages, he created a blockchain version of AngelList. During the ICO frenzy, the Filecoin team was also preparing for a large-scale financing, and Juan Benet, the founder of Filecoin, and Ravikant jointly created this crowdfunding platform that later gained fame in the cryptocurrency circle. Although the two founders jointly established CoinList and the product and operation team also came from AngelList, the CEO selected someone else, Andy Bromberg.
Andy graduated from Stanford University with a major in Mathematics and Computer Science and participated in the establishment of the Stanford Bitcoin Group to promote Bitcoin. In addition, he is also the co-founder and CEO of Sidewire.
After a short period of being in charge of CoinList, although he remains one of the co-founders, Andy’s main focus shifted to the newly established non-custodial payment wallet, Beam. The CEO position was replaced by Graham Jenkin, but he did not hold the position for a long time before being replaced by Raghav Gulati.
Raghav Gulati previously served as a venture partner at sha for nearly 6 years, and then worked as a product engineer at Shyp, Backplane, and KEEP. In 2019, he co-founded Apex and served as CEO. In June 2022, the Apex team collaborated with CoinList to improve the user experience of the latter. After joining CoinList, Raghav became the Vice President of Product Management and eventually rose to CEO.
CoinList’s product business is now divided into two main parts: the trading, OTC, and staking platforms for users, and the launch, testnet, seed, and registration functions for developers.
Despite the negative impact of the transition from a bull market to a bear market and a series of project failures, CoinList has achieved good results. In its 2022 review, it stated that it has added a total of one million KYC users. In 2023, after the market recovered, an additional 600,000 users were added, with the strongest growth in Europe and Asia, where over 1.5 million users registered to participate, and the cumulative token sales exceeded 20 million USD.
However, one long-standing criticism of CoinList is its very strict KYC certification. In the past, when KYC was not strict, many users would purchase identities through intermediaries to obtain higher returns. CoinList discovered this method and imposed severe penalties.
In May 2023, CoinList issued a warning stating that “purchasing CoinList accounts from third parties poses serious dangers and consequences. Purchasing accounts directly violates CoinList’s terms of service and will result in the immediate termination of related accounts.” In addition, since the sellers of the accounts are the owners of KYC, they can reclaim CoinList and regain access to their accounts, and then the account sellers can withdraw funds, resulting in irreversible losses for the account buyers. Malicious sellers can even try to regain access to the “sold” CoinList accounts in an attempt to hold the accounts for ransom. In such cases, CoinList will be unable to assist users in recovering their assets.
Shortly after, a significant number of Chinese users who bought accounts found their batch accounts banned and withdrawals suspended, and even their remaining funds were confiscated by the platform.
In fact, CoinList, which focuses on compliance, is strict in its KYC requirements, and users from many countries in the jurisdiction of the law are prohibited from participating in new project public offerings. Common countries like the United States and China are often strictly prohibited from participating in any projects. Before each new project sale, users need to select the corresponding country and region and submit certification materials. If they do not meet the requirements, they will not be able to participate in the sale.
In December 2023, CoinList violated OFAC-related sanctions and paid a settlement of 1.2 million USD. CoinList Markets LLC opened accounts for 89 users, almost all of whom specified “Russia” as their country of residence but provided addresses in Crimea when opening accounts.
Behind CoinList’s strict KYC requirements, it to some extent protects its own brand compliance, but it also makes many players lament the loss of wealth.
During the last bull market cycle, CoinList was at its peak, and many well-known projects that received huge returns participated in the public offering, and it can be said that anyone who managed to participate earned profits. Star projects such as NEAR, SOL, and FLOW brought CoinList great reputation in the industry.
In March 2018, Solana raised $3.2 million in its seed round (0.04 USD/token). In June 2018, it raised $12.6 million in its genesis round (approximately $0.20/SOL). In July 2019, it raised $5.7 million in its validator round, with a price of about $0.225/SOL. In February 2020, it raised $2.4 million in its launch round, with SOL priced at around $0.25.
In March 2020, CoinList completed the auction of 8 million SOL tokens, raising a total of $1.76 million, equivalent to $0.22 per token. Calculated based on the historical high of $260, the return was as high as 1180 times.
In August 2020, sharded blockchain NEAR conducted a public offering on CoinList, offering three options:
Option 1: Price of $0.4, lock-up period of 40 days, a total of 25 million tokens, minimum purchase of 500 tokens, maximum purchase of 1 million tokens.
Option 2: Price of $0.34, linear lock-up period of 1 year, maximum purchase of 5 million tokens.
Option 3: Price of $0.29, linear lock-up period of 2 years, maximum purchase of 5 million tokens.
In the end, nearly $30 million was raised, and it is worth mentioning that due to the high traffic congestion and overwhelming community participation, CoinList had to delay the public sale.
During the last cycle, NEAR reached a near-historic high of $20.6. Calculated based on the cost price of $0.34, the return was as high as 60.5 times.
In August 2020, Dapper Labs, the developer of the FLOW blockchain, raised $11.4 million, including 20 institutions and 5 NBA stars. Previous round investors included Samsung NEXT, Andreessen Horowitz and its Cultural Leadership Fund, Union Square Ventures, Venrock, Accomplice, Animoca Brands, and AppWorks. New participating investment institutions included Coinbase Ventures and Distributed Global.
In September 2020, the Flow blockchain token FLOW, created by the Dapper Labs team, was sold to the community at a private placement price of $0.1, with a total of 1 billion tokens available. Although it entered the market at the end of the bull market, resulting in a continuous decline in price and eventual silence, calculated based on the historical high of $35.6, the return was nearly 356 times.
Previously, some players made a lot of profits by participating in FLOW projects with multiple accounts.
In March 2022, Mina completed a strategic and private placement financing of $92 million, with FTX Ventures and Three Arrows Capital leading the investment, and participants including Alan Howard, Amber Group, Blockchain.com, Circle Ventures, Pantera, etc.
Mina Protocol can be regarded as a pioneer protocol for zero-knowledge proofs and has attracted a lot of attention since the last cycle. In March 2021, it was launched on CoinList, with 75 million MINA tokens issued in two rounds at a price of $0.25 per token. Subsequently, CoinList reduced the purchase limit from $1,000 to $500.
If calculated based on the historical high price of $6.68, the return would be 26.72 times.
In May 2020, Celo raised $20 million in financing, with participation from a16z, Greenfield One, and Electric Capital.
In May 2020, CELO completed a Dutch auction on CoinList, raising a total of $10 million, with an average settlement price of $1 per token. Calculated based on the historical high of $10.95, the return rate exceeded 10 times.
Unfortunately, after 2021, the projects launched on CoinList often performed poorly or fell below the public offering price, leading to many doubts. Examples include NYM, AXEL, GAL, Arch, and CYBER. By organizing the data, it was found that projects launched in the late bull market often suffered from negative impacts of market downturns. Even if the projects were endorsed by well-known VCs and had good fundamentals, they could not escape the negative effects of market cycles.
Some of these projects still performed well after the market recovered at the end of 2023, but most of them were quickly forgotten by the market and received little attention.
In March 2020, this project raised $28.5 million, with participating institutions including Consensus Capital, HashKey Capital, AU21 Capital, Blockchange Ventures, GSR, etc.
In March 2021, CoinList’s public offering had a total quota of 100 million CSPR tokens, accounting for 1% of the total supply, with a price of $0.015 per token. When it started trading, it briefly exceeded $1.3, but then declined continuously, resulting in negative sentiment.The price of Axelar has been fluctuating around $0.04. Founded in 2020, Axelar is built on Cosmos technology to provide interoperability with Ethereum and other chains. In July 2021, it completed a $25 million Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Dragonfly Capital, Galaxy Digital, North Island Ventures, and Robot Ventures. In February 2022, it completed a $35 million funding round with participation from Dragonfly Capital, Polychain Capital, North Island Ventures, and Rockaway Blockchain Fund. In March 2022, Axelar sold a supply of 50 million tokens at a price of $1 each, with a minimum participation amount of $100 and a maximum of $750. Trading began in the second half of 2022, and the price briefly reached $1 in early January 2024, but is currently still below $1.
Ondo Finance builds and manages institutional-grade financial products such as US Treasuries and money market funds, and develops DeFi protocols around these products. Ondo aims to develop decentralized, composable protocols and provide tailored services to meet the needs of organizations, DAOs, and high-net-worth individuals. Ondo Finance was founded by Allman and Pinku Surana, former Goldman Sachs employees, in 2021. In April 2022, it completed a $20 million funding round led by Founders Fund, a venture capital fund co-founded by Peter Thiel, along with Pantera Capital. Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, GoldenTree Asset Management, and Wintermute also participated in the funding round. In May 2022, Ondo Finance sold a supply of 400 million tokens on CoinList at a price of $0.055 each, with a minimum participation of $100 and a maximum of $2,000. Over 16,500 people participated in the public sale and purchased the native token ONDO, accounting for approximately 2% of the total token supply of 10 billion. The token was listed for trading in January 2024, reaching a peak price of over $0.3, but the current return is less than 6 times the initial price.
Nym is a privacy platform that provides strong network-level privacy against sophisticated end-to-end attackers and uses blinded, re-randomizable, and decentralized credentials for anonymous access control. Nym Technologies completed a $2.5 million seed funding round in 2019, with participation from NGC, Lemniscap, and Edenblock. In July 2021, it completed a $6 million Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Eden Block, Greenfield One, Maven11, Tioga, and 1kx. Subsequently, in November, it completed a $13 million funding round led by a16z, with participation from DCG, Tayssir Capital, Huobi Ventures, HashKey, and Fenbushi Capital. In February 2022, Nym Technologies sold over $30 million worth of NYM tokens on CoinList. The token sale attracted record demand on CoinList, with over 1.19 million unique registrants during the 5-day registration period. The token price ranged from $0.25 to $0.5 and briefly exceeded $1.8 after listing, but has since declined and is currently below $0.2.
Galxe is a Web3 certificate infrastructure that aims to help Web3 brands build communities and products. In January 2022, Galxe raised $10 million in funding, with Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital leading the round. Spartan Group, Sky9 Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Binance Smart Chain Growth Fund, Folius Ventures, Jump Capital, Sfermion, HashKey, Injective Protocol, Matrixport Ventures, Solana Ventures, and Alameda Research also participated. In February 2022, Galxe launched a public sale of 10 million GAL tokens on CoinList at a price of $1.5 each. The entire allocation was sold out within 50 minutes, with over 1.07 million users registered to participate. After listing, GAL benefited from the NFT market and briefly exceeded $17, but has since declined and is currently priced at $1.8, only $0.3 higher than the public sale price.
CyberConnect is a multi-chain decentralized social graph protocol that allows developers to build social applications and users to have their own digital identities (DID), content, connections, and tokenized channels. In November 2021, CyberConnect completed a $10 million seed funding round led by Multicoin Capital and Sky9 Capital, with participation from Animoca Brands, DraperDragon, Hashed, and Mask Network. In May 2022, it completed a $15 million Series A funding round led by Animoca Brands and Sky9 Capital. CyberConnect had a public distribution of 3% on CoinList at a price of $1.8 per token, while the institutional price in the Series A funding round was $3. After raising a total of $5.4 million on CoinList, the token briefly exceeded $17 after listing, resulting in a return of nearly 10 times. At the current price of $7, the return is only 3.8 times.
NEON is a fully compatible Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that allows developers to use familiar Ethereum tools and seamlessly build on Solana. In November 2021, Neon Labs raised $40 million in funding, with Jump Capital leading the round and participation from Three Arrows Capital, Solana Capital, and IDEO CoLab Ventures. In May 2023, NEON sold a supply of 50,000,000 NEON tokens on CoinList at a price of $0.1 each, accounting for 5% of the total circulating supply. After a long period of dormancy, it reached a peak of $3.8 at the end of 2023, resulting in a return of nearly 38 times, but the current price has fallen to $1.4.
Chainflip is a decentralized, trustless protocol that allows seamless value transfer between any blockchain, including BTC, EVM, and Layer 1 networks. In August 2021, it announced the completion of a $6 million funding round led by Framework Ventures, and in May 2022, it announced the completion of a $10 million funding round with participation from Framework Ventures, Blockchain Capital, and Pantera Capital. In September 2023, Chainflip conducted a token sale on CoinList with a supply of 4,500,000 FLIP tokens (ERC-20) at a price of $1.83 each. After listing, it briefly exceeded $7, but is now trading above $5.
Archway is a fast and low-cost transaction provider on the Cosmos ecosystem L1 blockchain. In March 2023, Phi Labs, the development company behind Archway, completed a $21 million seed funding round with CoinFund and Hashed leading the round and participation from 1confirmation, IDEO CoLab, Figment, Blockchain Capital, Wintermute, Chorus One, and stake.fish. In May 2023, Archway conducted a public sale on CoinList with a total supply of 30,000,000 ARCH tokens at a price of $0.2 each. After listing, the price started to decline and reached a low of around $0.05. It briefly rose to $0.28 at the end of the year, but has since fallen to around $0.18, still below the public sale price.
Subsquid was developed from a project on the Kusama hackathon Hackusama and provides support for building DApps on Substrate to reduce data retrieval time and improve API reliability for developers. In November 2021, Subsquid completed a $3.8 million seed funding round led by Hypersphere Ventures, with participation from Zeeprime Capital, Lattice Capital, Illusionist Group, and Digital Finance Group (DFG). In January 2024, Subsquid conducted a token sale on CoinList with a supply of 53,480,000 SQD tokens at a price of $0.094 each.
zkLink is a multi-chain integrated trading platform based on ZK-Rollup technology that aims to connect multiple chains and aggregate liquidity from different ecosystems to enable the trading and composition of native DeFi assets on different chains. In October 2021, zkLink raised $8.5 million in funding, with Republic Crypto leading the round and participation from Arrington Capital, DeFi Alliance, Huobi Ventures, and GSR. In May 2023, it completed a $10 million funding round with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Ascensive Assets, SIG DTI, BigBrain Holdings, and Efficient Frontier. In January 2024, zkLink conducted a token sale on CoinList with a supply of 31,250,000 ZKL tokens (ERC-20) at a price of $0.15 each.
Nibiru is a Cosmos ecosystem L1 blockchain that provides support for DeFi, RWA, and other smart contract centers. In April 2023, Nibiru completed an $8.5 million seed funding round led by Tribe Capital, Republic Capital, NGC Ventures, and Original Capital. On February 2, 2024, the L1 blockchain Nibiru will launch the NIBI token community sale on CoinList. The community sale will have a token supply of 60 million NIBI tokens, accounting for 4% of the total supply, at a price of $0.05 per token.
Meson Network focuses on DePIN+AI to build a human-authorized decentralized physical network. Meson Network’s “DePIN” nodes are developed using user-friendly technology. In June 2021, Meson Network completed a multi-million dollar funding round led by Libertus, Mask Network, and Hash Global, with participation from DCG, Hashkey Capital, Permanent Ventures, and BixinVC. In January 2024, it completed a strategic funding round led by Presto Labs with a valuation of $1 billion, but the specific funding amount was not disclosed. On February 9, 2024, CoinList will sell a token supply of 2.5 million MSN tokens, accounting for 2.5% of the total supply, at a price of $1.75 per token.