Russian startup, and Putin’s ally, wants to raise $100 mln in Bitcoin

An advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to raise as much as $100 million in an initial coin offering (ICO). The funding effort for the "Russian Mining Company" was revealed this week by Dmitry Marinichev, who serves as the internet ombudsman to Putin's office.

According to a presentation published in tandem with the unveiling, the team behind the effort is planning to tap as much as 20 megawatts to power their mining farm, using chips developed domestically. Bitcoin mining is an energy intensive process by which new transactions are added to the blockchain, creating new tokens – 12.5 BTC, or roughly $42,000 at current prices – as a reward for the miner.

The ICO is the first planned release on a new service jointly created by the Party for Growth, a Russian political partner, and the developers of the Waves blockchain platform. The initiative was first unveiled in June.

Russian billionaire and party chairman Boris Titov, according a new blog post, remarked during a presser yesterday that the platform would act as a screening mechanism for projects hoping to launch ICOs.

“Russia has the potential to reach up to 30 percent share in global cryptocurrency mining in the future," Marinichev said, adding that $10 million from the proceeds of the ICO may be spent developing the processors.

If the offering does raise the target amount, it would represent one of an increasingly growing number of big-ticket ICOs that have occurred in recent months. According to data from CoinDesk's ICO Tracker, more than $1.6 billion has been raised through the ICO model to date.

More and more startups are offering tokens as a way to raise money upfront for digital assets in ICOs. Unlike a traditional IPO in which buyers get shares, a startup’s ICO nets you virtual tokens unique to the issuing company or network that grow in value only if the business proves viable.