BlockBeats News, January 22nd, Decentralized Leveraged Prediction Market Space sparked market controversy in its latest ICO round, with the project originally disclosing a fundraising target of $2.5 million but ultimately raising as much as $20 million.
The project team later responded that the $2.5 million was a “soft cap” rather than a “hard cap,” a disclosure consistent with Launchpad industry practice, thus allowing for an expansion of the fundraising scale in response to strong market demand. The team stated that $2.5 million could only support “the project’s initial development for a few months” and was not sufficient to sustain the multi-year development of a leveraged prediction market infrastructure.
According to the team’s disclosure, they plan to retain around $13 million of the overraised funds under a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of approximately $69 million, with the remaining portion allocated to liquidity, ecosystem, and market-related purposes.
However, this explanation did not quell doubts. Ethos CEO Serpin Taxt stated that the behavior of the project, raising a “nominal $2.5 million, actual $20 million, and retaining around $14 million of it,” constituted malicious conduct and likened it to the controversial Trove project that was previously criticized.
Community discussions believe that this event once again exposes the structural issues of certain ICOs in terms of information disclosure, fundraising cap design, and transparency in fund utilization.
