Block.one
Basics
- Also known as B1
- a Cayman Islands exempted company providing end-to-end solutions to bring businesses onto the blockchain, from strategic planning to product deployment. EOS.IO was the only product mentioned on block.one website. Later on (2020-2021) they also created Voice and Bullish, but both were not built on top of EOS.
Bullish Global
"Block.one has pulled together $10 billion to get Bullish Global off the ground. Block.one supplied 164,000 Bitcoin ($9.25 billion), 20 million EOS tokens ($250 million), and $100 million in cash, while also raising $300 million in strategic funding."
Voice
- The Block reported that B1 has a $150M budget for Voice, its social network project. Update (26-3-2020): invested another $150M to fund independent operations. "As The Block previously reported, the social media app took Block.one at least a year to build and cost $150 million, including a $30 million purchase of the Voice.com domain name. In total, the company has spent $300 million on the social media app to date, Block.one confirmed to The Block."
- From CoinDesk (27-3-2020):
"Block.one has acquired the team behind once-prominent block producer EOS New York, which has now entirely ceased operations."
Settlements
"Block.one settled a class-action lawsuit filed by the Crypto Assets Opportunity Fund (CAOF) related to the company’s recording-setting $4 billion token sale in 2018. The court-approved $27.5 million settlement closes the lawsuit, Block.one announced Friday. The CAOF argued that Block.one had purposefully misled investors and artificially inflated its eos token price during its yearlong initial coin offering (ICO), which ended in 2018. Block.one previously settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for $24 million over the alleged unregistered securities sale."
Security
- The fact that Block.One’s internal systems have been hacked during its ICO, leading to millions in investor’s funds being stolen by phishers, does not provide for much confidence in the company’s abilities to make secure systems.
- Continuing on the subject of security, Block.One has announced a $10.000 bounty for every bug found in its software. Within a week, a single security researcher was able to rack in $120.000 by finding and reporting bugs. Of course I am not saying bug bounties are a bad thing and I realize that any software will have some bugs, but this just seems a bit too easy.
Team, Funding.
- Brendan Blumer: CEO. Blumer is owning an estimated 15% of Block.one.
Funding
- Peter Thiel & Bitmain were the lead in a new investment round in Block.one.
"Its backers include UK hedge fund manager Alan Howard, Moore Capital Management CEO Louis Bacon, and PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—all of whom invested in Bullish's funding round. Mike Novogratz, whose asset management firm Galaxy Digital also partook in the funding round."
- Block.One was scheduled to get 10% of the EOS supply, however in 12-2021 the community revolted and halted their payments, citing that Block.One had failed to deliver on their promisses.
- Formosa; invested in their private sale, this Jeffery Huang project which seemed to have frauded investors money afterwards (16-6-2022).
