Party like it’s 2017 because on Monday (February 25th), UK-based “Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economics company” Fetch.AI showed the world that raising a substantial amount of funds quickly via an initial coin offering (ICO) was still possible—providing you conduct the token sale on Binance Launchpad.

This was Binance Launchpad’s second token sale of 2019 (the first being the sale of BitTorrent tokens, which took place on January 28th), and the public’s appetite for Fetch.AI (FET) tokens was so high that the sale was completed in even a shorter than time than the BitTorrent (BTT) token sale. Perhaps, the reason for such high demand was that traders/investors had seen what had happened with the BTT token sale: the sale had ended in less than 15 minutes, and the price of those tokens has gone up over 600% since the day of the sale. Also, the fact that AI is very hot right now and that the team behind Fetch.AI has an excellent pedigree did not hurt either.

In a press release issued on February 6th, Fetch.AI described itself as “providing the world’s first decentralised infrastructure for… ‘Autonomous Economic Agents’ to find, communicate and trade with each other,” with the Fetch.AI token (FET) acting “as the medium of exchange, allowing autonomous agents to exchange tokens for data, services, and other goods within the Fetch.AI network, easily supporting machine-to-machine microtransactions.”

Using Fetch.AI, “virtually any networked machine or real-world asset, such as a hotel room or hospital bed, can now be represented by an autonomous agent so they can manage their own affairs, like autonomous booking, pricing, and maintainance;” this allows “new marketplaces to evolve and flourish without the need for intermediaries.”

This is how Fetch.AI CEO Humayun Sheikh described the motivation for the project:

“Today’s internet is built for ecommerce solutions that enable connectivity between humans. The new web needs to enable more autonomous machine based solutions and this requires building the infrastructure and tools to make it deployable. Fetch.AI is building the deployment infrastructure, which brings the new AI-based autonomous machine economy to life.”

Sheikh used the following example to explain the benefits of Fetch.AI’s approach:

“Let’s take travel. Today, people rely on traditional travel agents or spend hours searching for the travel combinations they need. An autonomous agent learns from your behaviour to build a clearer picture of your needs. It uses that insight to search vast combinations of options, confirms availability with, say, an airline or rail network, negotiates a price and completes the transaction. For businesses, this enables a more targeted selling opportunity without the need for a user’s personal data or deployment of machine learning algorithms.”

Binance announced on its blog on February 1st that Binance Launchpad would be offering Fetch.AI tokens to the public on February 25th at 14:00 UTC. The blog post said that Binance Launchpad would only be accepting Binance Coin (BNB) for payment and that there would only be one session (unlike with the BitTorrent token sale, which took place in two parallel sessions, one in BNB and one in TRX).  

The total public sale allocation was 69,204,152 FET, i.e. 6% of the total token supply (1,152997,575 FET). And yesterday, a short time before the start of the public sale, the price of one FET token was set to 0.008584 (roughly $0.0867). 

The Fetch.AI token sale took place at the scheduled time without any technical problems.

Binance announced the results of the sale in a blog post published yesterday. Here are the numbers:

  • “… all 69,204,152 FET were sold to token sale participants within 11 minutes and 14 seconds”
  • “About 24000 people pre-signed the User Agreement, while 19,860 people successfully submitted a buy order. Out of those people, 2,758 people successfully purchased FET”
  • “Participants were able to purchase between 230 FET (the minimum amount eligible for purchase) and 34,602 FET (the maximum amount).”

Here is Changpeng Zhao (“CZ for short), Co-Founder and CEO of Binance, explaining that in reality the sale was over in just 10 seconds:

 

Featured Image Courtesy of Fetch.AI