Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186 Million in One Hour Overwhelms System

The Filecoin pre-ICO sale raised $52 million from big name Silicon Valley investors just last week.

ICO mania is still going strong despite all the hacks, repeated technical glitches, worries about wrong incentives and warnings by regulators from around the world. We just got an example for this today as Filecoin was forced to suspend their ICO after an incredible amount of money directed towards it overwhelmed the system.

Filecoin is a cryptocurrency powered storage network. Miners earn Filecoin by providing open hard-drive space to the network, while users spend Filecoin to store their files encrypted in the decentralized network.

If you wonder why such a non-sexy and not incredibly unique product like a decentralized file system would get so much attention from investors, you need not look farther than its list of backers. Last week a group of top 150 Silicon Valley venture capital brand names invested $52 million in the project, these include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Winklevoss Capital.

The Filecoin ICO has an uncapped USD target and money started pouring in a torrent of transactions as soon as the sale was open to the public (accredited investors). Soon the team behind the project reported funds totaling $252 million were inbound.

This however proved too much traffic for the ICO to handle and backlog of conformation was created, frustrating investors that could not tell if the got in on the action or not, just like happened with previous massive ICOs. The raised figure was updated down soon after to the amount Filecoin was able to confirm.

This article was first reported by Avi Mizrahi on Financemagnates.com.