[jasonmorton]

Among the interesting things about Ethereum is that they built a billion-dollar "company" in a totally nontraditional way. Instead of VC, they raised money in a presale, the developers have liquidity from the beginning, and none of it required permission from anyone. Just people buying into the concept. Seems clear that this sort of thing being possible stands to change things for regulators, investors, and other market participants.

[TylerE]

Is that really a valid valuation? If they tired to liqudate even a small fraction it would surely tank the price to essentailly zero.

[onestone]

The same can be said for any public company.

[TylerE]

Not really. Is there any public company whose entire product is essentially printing stock certificates?

[erikpukinskis]

The product is actually internet hosting as a service. It is being administered by an autonomous artificial intelligence, who runs the books and decides who owes who how much. That AI is its own corporation, and is a separate entity from the Ethereum Foundation, which created it and organized the initial public offering of web hosting tokens. The tokens can be exchanged for hosting.

They have some value on the open market which is a function of how much people are willing to pay for Ethereum hosting and how much people think people will be willing to pay for it in the future.

[hackerboos]

This appears to have become the standard way to fund blockchain-based companies.

Storj is using the same approach - https://storj.io/