Jeff Garzik, former Bitcoin core developer, has sold almost half of the available tokens in his Metronome project’s initial coin offering to just 3 investors.
According to data from the Ethereum blockchain, which confirm the giant transactions, some potential investors were unable to purchase tokens themselves.
Metronome (MET), which Garzik initially revealed via his startup Bloq last year, is designed to be a cross-blockchain cryptocurrency affording users the ability to ‘swap’ between different cryptocurrencies’ blockchains using the same coin.
Coming at the height of Bitcoin community controversy over SegWit2x — which Garzik endorsed — Bloq claimed Metronome would constitute a “thousand-year cryptocurrency.”
Co-founder Matthew Roszak said at the time that “Institutional investors should be very excited to see something like this”.
Developers issued a total of 10 million MET tokens, of which 8 million were available during the ICO. The remainder were kept by Bloq. The token sale was held in the form of a descending price auction,” in which the token price lowers with time.
“As time progresses and MET remains available, the auction price will decline linearly until the auction ends or all MET are sold,” – developers explained on the project’s GitHub.
Before the token sale ended on June 25, complaints began to appear on social media about a sudden buy-up of the vast majority of available tokens — which meant most other purchases failed.
“Last minutes of token auction went to very big whales,” – one Reddit user commented, uploading 3 transactions for a total of around 3.3 million tokens. One such whale bought almost 2 million tokens in a single transaction.
