Why a $39 Million ICO Chose Stellar Over Ethereum

"We look at ethereum like AOL or Myspace."

That's how Mobius Network co-founder and CEO David Gobaud explains why his startup ran its initial coin offering (ICO) on the Stellar network instead of ethereum, the most popular blockchain for token sales.

The comment underscores the growing interest in some corners of the crypto community for faster and cheaper payment rails as ethereum, like bitcoin, struggles to scale.

Mobius announced Thursday that it has raised $39 million in the ICO — one of the larger recent token sales and the largest by far on the Stellar platform. The company accepted only Stellar's native currency, lumens (XLM), in exchange for its own token, known as mobi.

According to Mobius, the sale hit its $39 million hard cap after only two hours, selling 35 percent of the total 888 million mobi tokens.

Participants in the round included China's Angel Chain Capital, Nirvana Capital and WaltonChain, an internet of things (IoT) startup that is building devices to enable manufacturers and retailers to track supply chains, according to the firm's website.

In addition to this backing, Gobaud emphasized that Mobius deployed its decentralized app (dapp) store alongside its ICO, saying it was important for the company to come out with live code early, to prove the project was real.

But what's perhaps most striking about the sale was the choice of blockchain.

While latency or cost might not be a dealbreaker for some blockchain projects, they are for Mobius' use case. Its thesis is that traditional tech companies will soon want to integrate with cryptocurrencies and, eventually, a decentralized web.

Mobius' white paper compares the company's work to that of Stripe, the Silicon Valley darling that took integration of credit card payments down to a few lines of code (and incubated Stellar in its early days). Mobius aims to do the same thing for cryptocurrency payments and, down the line, for publishing data to trade on decentralized marketplaces.

So the company needed an IoT-friendly network that could handle large amounts of transactions and data quickly, with low or no fees.

The goal is to "make it easy to connect every device, developer and data stream to the blockchain ecosystem," Gobaud said.

Yet while the vast majority of ICO-funded projects have been run on top of ethereum, using the ERC-20 standard, that blockchain has suffered from transaction backlogs and pendulum-like swings in fees.

Hence, after beginning its project on ethereum, Mobius switched to Stellar, the protocol created by Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb. Like Ripple before it, Stellar was designed specifically for frictionless payments.

Trade-offs
Ethereum's scaling challenges have become acute in recent months. The issue moved Kik to announce that it would move its kin token off ethereum in December 2017.

While the ethereum developers recognize and are working on the problem, the Mobius team couldn't wait for a scaling solution, Gobaud said.

"We were building our dapp store on ethereum and then we connected with Jed," he said adding:

"We realized there was no way that ethereum could handle our technology. It was too slow, too expensive and too insecure. ... We see all these other projects with these immense problems"

Gobaud highlighted the problems with safely deploying smart contracts. "They are Turing complete programs, but they are really hard to write," he said, pointing to the first and second multi-million-dollar ether losses on Parity. Solidity was not a language built with security in mind, Gobaud argued.

In Stellar, "we think we've uncovered this underutilized, really unknown technology," Gobaud said.

For example, Stellar supports multi-signature wallets at the protocol level, making custodianship much easier for developers.

But Stellar has its downsides, Gobaud acknowledged. It's not Turing complete, for example, but Mobius is happy to make that trade-off in exchange for vastly faster and cheaper transactions.