Illustrating the growing traction of blockchain technologies in the country, a team of Russian scientists and financial experts has just raised $7.07 million from 3,955 backers on a blockchain-based crowdfunding platform.
Dubbed ‘ZrCoin,’ the project consists in building a factory to recycle metallurgical waste using an innovative technology.
The team presents their project as “the first-ever blockchain option for investing in the production of an in-demand industrial material.”
The sum was secured through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), a new blockchain-based investment mechanism, on the Waves crypto-platform.
“We raised twice as much funding as planned [$3.5 million]. This is a huge success for the first ICO of its kind on the market,” commented ZrCoin’s co-founder Andrey Nikonorov.
The facility will consist in two production lines transforming industrial waste into synthetic zirconium with a total capacity of 800 tons per month in Magnitogorsk, Siberia. The first line is scheduled to deploy in the spring of 2018.
Each ZrCoin token is backed with one kilogram of zirconium dioxide. After the production starts, the tokens will be bought back by ZrCoin at the market price of the final product ($2.80).
Backers, however, will be able to either sell their ZrCoin to the company or on the open market. Alternatively, they may receive the zirconium dioxide equivalent of their investment.
The project team claims to have already injected around $1 million of their own funds in R&D.
Last month ZrCoin announced that it launched an office in China.
Launched by Russian entrepreneur Sasha Ivanov in 2016, Waves is a crypto-platform for asset and custom token issuance, transfer and trading on blockchain. Among the platform’s partners is Boris Titov. This Russian billionaire politician intends to use Waves for entrepreneurs and companies to raise money in cryptocurrency for their projects.
Sources: ZrCoin (1, 2), CrunchBase.
