Digital currency startup NeuCoin’s 60-day crowd pre-sale aims to raise the additional funds needed to prepare for the company’s public launch this summer.
One hundred million NeuCoin will be up for sale April 28 in exchange for bitcoin. The price will start at 25,000 NeuCoin for 1 Bitcoin (approx. $0.01 per NeuCoin) and increase by 1 percent each day. The pre-sale will end after 60 days or after all coins have been sold.
The Paris-based NeuCoin startup has already raised $2.25 million from a group of investors.
Co-founder Dan Kaufman is confident about the launch of NeuCoin and told Bitcoin Magazine:
“We’ve been getting thousands of emails and feel there’s a lot of interest and anticipation for the pre-sale. People seem to appreciate our solid angel investors and consumer-friendly micropayments approach. Since there are no daily caps, the 100 million NeuCoins may sell out very fast.”
In addition, the company will be distributing its “freemium” model free to consumers who just want to try it out, and there will be more for customers who recruit other new customers. Businesses that promote NeuCoin and accept micropayments in NeuCoin will also receive “freemium” coin.
What is NeuCoin?
NeuCoin is a digital currency that is easy to use and ideal for online tipping and micropayments. Co-founder Dan Kaufman says he made the consumer his first priority and his goal was always to develop the most user-friendly of all the digital currencies.
NeuCoin uses a similar model to Peercoin and is often referred to as a peer-to-peer coin. It is based on proof-of-stake (PoS), rather than proof-of-work (PoW) and pays interest to owners as the coin is staked (as opposed to miners).
Neucoin says that its high PoS rates reward early NeuCoin adopters and address a key security issue by rewarding PoS miners to stake numerous NeuCoins and operate many nodes.
Why NeuCoin instead of Bitcoin?
According to Dan Kauffman, the real motivator for developing NeuCoin was the inaccessibility and techie nature of Bitcoin – a great idea but too hard for consumers to access and use.
Kaufman, with his partners Johan Sandstrom, Ophélie Pubellier and Scott Walker, recently released a whitepaper arguing that Proof of Stake (PoS) is superior to Bitcoin’s Proof of Work with its high costs, mining centralization and the ever-increasing costs of Bitcoin mining hardware.
Kaufman maintains that Bitcoin suffers from too much centralization, particularly in the area of mining, with fewer companies owning more and more mining equipment.
And he says it is more than likely that Bitcoin transaction fees will go up in the future.
Early Investors
Major angel investors include Emil Michael, SVP of business at Uber, Henrik Kjellberg, president of Hotwire, Patrik Stymne, co-founder of King (Candy Crush Saga), Rob Goldman, head of growth at Facebook, Ted Rogers from Xapo, and dozens of other top tech and media executives.
Strategic advisers to the startup include Spotify’s Alex Norstrom, Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer and Brock Pierce, entrepreneur and Bitcoin Foundation board member.
Three Nonprofit Foundations designed to decentralize NeuCoin
Three nonprofit groups located on the Isle of Man will develop and support NeuCoin, each with their own focus – core development, growth and utility.
Each foundation has different council members, budgets and priorities and is ultimately controlled by all the people who own NeuCoin (one coin equals one vote).
About 2.4 billion of the total NeuCoin supply has been placed in the hands of these three independent foundations, and they are responsible for distributing these coins to developers and entrepreneurs.
The NeuCoin team is planning a public launch for July and has said they will guarantee that if the NeuCoin platform isn’t up and running by September they’ll return the pre-sale funds, which will be held in escrow until the coin is issued.
“With the funding from our angel investors…we already have all the money needed to finish the code, the super easy online wallet, the consumer on-boarding site and more,” Kaufman said. “The proceeds from the pre-sale will go to NeuCoin’s nonprofit foundations and fund later consumer marketing and development of micropayment platforms with MondoMedia, a video content producer with the largest animation channel on YouTube, to develop and Jango.com, a streaming music service with 8 million monthly listeners.”
