EOS’s year-long ICO is finally ending with a mass Ethereum sale
EOS has billions of dollars' worth of Ether to move and doesn't seem too worried about the price.
EOS has become infamous for its seemingly endless crowdsale, raising hundreds of thousands of Ether worth about $4 billion dollars over the course of a year. The endless crowdsale is now coming to an end with the launch of the EOS mainnet due for 2 June. The ERC20 (Ethereum network) EOS tokens will cease being issued on 1 June at 10:59pm UTC. About 24 hours later, the mainnet is set to go live.
EOS is marking the occasion by selling off massive amounts of Ether, TrustNodes reports, and over the last few days, hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of ETH has been moving from the crowdsale through intermediary wallets and onto Bitfinex.
Notably, it seems to be selling on the open market rather than over the counter as would almost always be done to avoid price slippage on sales of this magnitude. This was partially seen last week when EOS sold 200,000 ETH in a hurry, dropping prices into the $400 range on Bitfinex.
Like many other coins, EOS markets itself as Ethereum's biggest competitor, so the sale is almost certainly a deliberate attempt to hit Ethereum prices on the way out the door. The interesting part is that it looks like EOS is willing to take enormous losses, almost certainly in the range of millions of dollars to do so.
It might be an extremely expensive but also quite sensible move on EOS's part. It's already a polarising project, so there's no real cost to any bad PR the move might generate. Plus, deliberately moving the market is a common tactic in cryptocurrency, and after its astoundingly large crowdsale, EOS certainly has money to burn.
It's also a good time for EOS to start cashing out its war chest and start buying up EOS tokens. This might help stimulate the market, boost hype and shore up prices ahead of the mainnet launch.
Crypto markets have the unfortunate tendency to punish projects that actually release a working product, so some preventative measures could be smart. EOS might have found it especially useful in recent days, buying up the market to help absorb specific price drops. The frantic Ethereum sell-off on 28 May, for example, came almost exactly as a security firm published its findings of a devastating, but quickly fixed, EOS vulnerability.
By trading out hundreds of millions' worth of ETH for EOS on the open market rather than over the counter, EOS may have been able to cushion the inevitable price blow that follows that kind of news. Today's renewed selling might similarly be a response to the news that Block.com (EOS's parent company) was hacked, and that its contributors had their email addresses stolen and used in a sophisticated phishing attack.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author holds ETH, IOTA, ICX, VEN, XLM, BTC and NANO.
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