Hedera Hashgraph, which has raised $100M+ in 2018 ICO, asks investors to wait longer for purchased tokens, to help stabilize their cratering price
Hedera Hashgraph, the company behind the blockchain-like Hedera network, is asking investors to wait longer for tokens they paid for, in order to stabilize their cratering price.
Context & Ripple Effects
Hedera Hashgraph raised $100M+ in an August 2018 private ICO to fund what it claimed would be faster, more secure ledger technology than existing blockchains. Eighteen months on, the token it sold is falling fast enough that the company is asking buyers to accept delayed delivery — a request that only works because the 2018 fundraising wave had already shifted toward private sales that shut out small investors, concentrating holdings in fewer hands (as Bloomberg reported at the time).
The precedent is Bancor, whose ~$150M June 2017 ICO was followed by a 56% token collapse within months, alongside criticism of its code quality and value proposition. Hedera is now managing the same post-ICO overhang problem, but preemptively rather than after the crash.
First-order effects
- Investors who paid in the 2018 sale must wait longer for tokens they already bought, converting their paper gains into illiquid claims while Hedera throttles sell-side supply.
- Hedera buys time for its network development schedule, since a cratering token undermines both its treasury value and the credibility of its faster-than-blockchain pitch.
Second-order effects
- Other ICO-era projects with pending token unlocks face pressure to adopt similar voluntary lockups or see their own prices discounted for unlock risk.
- Future private-sale buyers will demand contractual vesting schedules up front rather than trusting issuers to request delays after the fact, repricing deals like Hedera's.
Third-order effects
- If issuance-by-private-sale remains the norm, token markets stay structurally prone to concentrated-holder exits, pushing the industry toward exchange-style lockup mechanics borrowed from traditional equity IPOs.
- Regulators scrutinizing ICOs gain a concrete case study of promised token delivery being renegotiated post-sale, feeding the legitimacy gap between crypto fundraising and securities norms.
The trend: ICO-funded networks are shifting from selling tokens freely to actively managing their release schedules as a price-stabilization tool, echoing the post-ICO declines that followed the 2017-2018 boom.