Cryptocurrency IDOs are one of the most popular methods for new projects in the cryptocurrency space to gain starting capital and some market recognition. The first cryptocurrency IDOs only started happening a couple years ago and now they are one of the most popular fundraising methods in the space.
With the rising popularity of IDOs, a new platform, Genesis Shards, created a novel fundraising method that perfectly complements IDOs: Pre-IDOs. Similar to IDOs, Pre-IDOs are also rapidly gaining in popularity. Genesis Shard’s recent Pre-IDO was for the upcoming project Unreal Finance and it received immense attention from the DeFi community.
What are Pre-IDOs
A Pre-IDO is a fundraising method that allows projects to sell some tokens before their IDO happens to prospective investors. Genesis Shards does this by creating options styled NFTs, and each of these NFTs is backed by a certain amount of tokens from an underlying project.
These NFT styled options are called cards by the Genesis Shard project. These pre-IDO cards are accessible to everyone but they are scarce and sometimes the demand for these cards can greatly exceed the supply. For example, a recent pre-IDO held on Genesis Shards was Unreal Finance, and even though they offered a relatively generous pre-IDO allocation it was overwhelmed by the extreme demand.
Pre-IDO Popularity
Genesis Shards’ Pre-IDO for Unreal Finance’s ERC-20 based $UGT tokens received over 176,000 entries to participate. With only around 350 NFTs on offer, it’s fair to say the $UGT Pre-IDO was overwhelmingly oversubscribed and definitely garnered a lot of attention. Especially when you consider that there are 1.25 million active users on Ethereum right now.
Even more interestingly, Unreal Finance is a DeFi-focused project and DeFi sits at a little over 1 million users. This number could be slightly inflated though since taking proper user metrics is difficult to do in decentralized finance. However, even taking the inflated number of DeFi users into consideration the Unreal Finance Pre-IDO managed to garner attention from potentially over 17.6% of the entire DeFi user base.
Unreal Finance
Unreal Finance is a very interesting project looking to revolutionize decentralized lending, which probably played a role in the immense popularity their Pre-IDO received. Unreal Finance is working towards allowing anyone to tokenize their yield on any platform like AAVE, Compound, dydx and realize its value in the present.
Unreal Finance allows people to realize the future value of their yield by tokenizing that yield and converting it into a tradeable currency. This tokenization of unrealized potential future yields opens up many avenues in DeFi such as fixed interest rate returns/loans and a decentralized interest market.
Exciting New Possibilities
The world is rapidly changing and no community in the world is more accustomed to change and growth than the crypto community. IDOs were an integral stepping stone that eventually allowed the entire DeFi industry to bloom and bring forth a new paradigm – the emergence of completely decentralized financial markets.
Pre-IDOs could drive this new paradigm of finance into mainstream adoption by giving innovative new projects like Unreal Finance the capital and recognition they need at a very early stage.
