New ICO: Bankera Raises a Cool USD 30 Mil in ICO Pre-Sale

Blockchain-based banking service Bankera wants to turn the traditional banking industry on its head, and it’s well on its way to making a dent. The Vilnius, Lithuania-based startup recently completed its ICO pre-sale of the Banker token, raising a remarkable USD 29 million-plus. If the pre-sale is any indication we could have another blockbuster deal on our hands.

The BNK token can be used for discounted financial products and services on the Bankera platform. Bankera wants to compete with traditional banks as a cryptocurrency friendly regulated bank on the blockchain that accepts both fiat currencies and digital coins including bitcoin, Ethereum, DASH, NEM and more.  

As different as the ICO and IPO processes are, the similarities can’t be ignored. For instance, Nuggets had its ICO pre-sale in recent days and hired Argon Investment Management, a division of the investment bank dedicated to cryptocurrencies, for its token sale. Bankera, meanwhile, brought on Digitalx, a corporate advisor to ICO deals.

More and more there are strikingly similar features between the two types of deals, which suggests that regulators could in fact find more reasons to treat the token sales more like equity transactions when they design a regulatory framework for the cryptocurrency asset class.

Leigh Travers, chief executive of Digitalx, recently spoke with Bloomberg, addressing the issue of saturation in the ICO market amid “explosive growth” and market capitalizations of digital coins rising more than six-times in the past year alone.

Travers describes China, a “fintech-forward” nation, which may come as a surprise to some. China observed signs of bubble forming in what he describes as an “overheated” market and that’s why they decided to move with the ban. He adds, however, that China’s reaction should prevent further froth in ICOs. 

Bankera is a subsidiary of SpectroCoin, whose infrastructure is designed to compare with the traditional banking sector. Bankera is meant to be a one-stop shopping for banking across “customer payment accounts with personal IBAN interbank foreign exchange rates” in addition to debit cards and payment processing.

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