The launch of Plasma’s initial coin offering (ICO) has been accused of being dominated by a small number of whales.
Plasma’s ICO is a little different from older ICOs, with the initial sale allowing you to purchase “units,” which “determine your guaranteed option to purchase XPL.”
Plasma advertises itself as “a high-throughput, scalable blockchain purpose-built for stablecoins.”
Its ICO was launched earlier today, June 9, with an initial deposit cap of $250 million and a $50 million cap per wallet. Its deposit vaults were filled mere moments later.
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This quickly led to accusations from cryptocurrency accounts on X that these deposits were all actually coming from a single whale: Justin Sun.
A review of the largest depositor wallets didn’t immediately reveal any links to Sun, suggesting that he may simply be a convenient scapegoat for users frustrated with the portion of the allocation that ended up in the wallets of these whales.
After the deposit cap was reached, the Plasma Foundation decided to increase the total cap for deposits to $500 million.
The rush to deposit caused a “gas war” that saw whales incentivized to spend large amounts of gas to make sure they were included in the earliest block possible for this allocation. One account apparently spent nearly $100,000 to ensure they’d be included.
The top 10 wallets received approximately 40% of the total increased allocation (this would be approximately 80% of the initial cap), and there is a total of 1,108 holders, according to data from Etherscan.
Plasma earlier received investment from Bitfinex and Tether, Peter Thiel, and Paolo Ardoino, the chief executive officer of Tether and chief technical officer of Bitfinex.
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