Earlier this week Crypto Insider reported that the Aragon Network, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) that wants to act as a container and a digital jurisdiction for other decentralized organizations, was selling a number of Aragon Network Tokens (ANTs) to the public, starting on May 17 the Ethereum blockchain.The token sale raised $25 million in 15 minutes.Less than one month ago, the Gnosis token sale raised $12.5 million in ten minutes, shattering previous Initial Coin Offering (ICO) records.But the record now belongs to Aragon.In view of the current ICO craze, however, it seems likely that the Aragon record itself might not last that long.Following a pattern that is becoming almost common, the ANT token sale raised $24,750,000 almost before starting.“Aragon token sale was finalized in less than 15 minutes,” the Aragon team announced with a tweet.“Thanks to all contributors, we are extremely humbled by the confidence deposited.” The feverish “gold rush” atmosphere in the ICO sphere is best exemplified by the scam perpetrated by the owners of fake Twitter account “Araqon” – which has been eventually disabled by Twitter, but not before diverting more than $10,000 to a fake ETH address.

“We are extremely delighted with the success of our token sale and are humbled that the community has placed this trust in Aragon,” said Aragon co-founder Luis Cuende, as reported by ETHNews and other blockchain news outlets.“We now have the resources to hire the best talent and execute one of the most ambitious projects, one which has the potential to create a more equal and fair society.” The Aragon Network wants to offer everything that is needed to create and run a company on Ethereum in one customizable package.The ANT token will be used to govern every single aspect of its functioning of the Aragon Network.“Aragon is a dApp that lets anyone create and manage any kind of organization (companies, open source projects, NGOs, foundations, hedge funds…) on the Ethereum blockchain,” explains the Aragon whitepaper.“Aragon implements basic features of an organization like a cap table, token transfers, voting, role assignments, fundraising, and accounting.The behavior of an Aragon organization is easily customized by changing the bylaws.

In addition, Aragon organizations are extensible through third party modules that interact with the organizations’ contracts.” DAOs are an innovative concept whose time is coming, but launching a DAO takes time and effort.Governance and operational models are tricky, and of course, if a DAO’s smart contract infrastructure requires actual software development, there’s always the possibility of catastrophic failure, as shown by The DAO’s rise and fall in 2016.Therefore, Aragon’s idea to offer a ready-to-use container for DAOs seems to make a lot of sense.“Our vision is to make decentralized organizations widespread,” reads Aragon’s one-page summary.“Our first step was to develop an extremely easy to use product on top of the Ethereum blockchain that lets everyone run decentralized organizations… The Aragon Network will let organizations opt-in to it and use the services it’ll provide.Moreover, it’ll provide a built-in governance system so the organizations using it will decide which services are provided, their cost, and other parameters.”

The open source, community-led blockchain project Qtum announced this week that the group has raised $1 million in seed funding from angel investors.reddit bitcoin verifyThe group seeks to merge the capabilities of the two most popular blockchain ecosystems—Bitcoin and Ethereum—to allow developers to create decentralized applications and execute smart contracts.que es la moneda electrónica bitcoinCore development of Qtum’s application stack and blockchain is done by Quantum Foundation, an organization registered in Singapore.cex bitcoinThe project’s list of investors includes a bevy of high-profile blockchain technology moguls such as Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio, Augur co-founder Jeremy Gardner, OkCoin Chief Executive Star Xu and a host of other prominent names.

Qtum is a fork of Bitcoin Core 0.13 that integrates code from the Ethereum Virtual Machine and an “account abstraction layer” that allows Ethereum smart contracts to run on the platform with minimal changes.The usefulness of this sort of approach is complicated, but the design is to take Ethereum’s powerful smart contact system and allow it to run with Bitcoin’s transaction-based design.The problem is that Bitcoin and Ethereum are fundamentally incompatible, but each exhibits extremely useful capabilities.One major industry interested in blockchains is the financial technology sector.The power of an immutable ledger of historical transactions would be extremely useful, such as with Bitcoin.At the same time, the industry could benefit from programmable transactions that Ethereum enables.The project’s founder, Patrick Dai, indicated to CoinDesk that the $1 million investment will help the team prepare Qtum’s infrastructure to sell cryptocurrency tokens produced by the platform for a crowd sale.

“We raised the money to prove that our approach is right,” Dai said.“We used the money to do the minimum viable product.The testnet is live now, but it is private, it is already working.” Dai said the crowdfunding would seek to raise up to $10 million during the token offering.Blockchain and cryptocurrency startups commonly use crowd sales of tokens or initial coin offerings in order to raise initial capital.In 2015, blockchain-based online game “Spells of Genesis” by EverdreamSoft SA and virtual reality content marketplace Voxelus Inc.used token sales to raise capital—EverdreamSoft raised $346,000 and Voxelus raised $350,000.Also in 2015, Augur’s predictive marketplace raised $1.3 million in its own crowd sale.In 2016, the Ethereum Decentralized Autonomous Organization, the DAO, raised over $130 million in ETH, the Ethereum token.According to an analysis by Smith + Crown, crowd sales and coin offerings have raised over $270 million within the industry over the past three years.