LayerX ICO Closes $420M Hard Cap in Fifteen Minutes, Rekindling 2017 Flashbacks
A zk-rollup with a three-page whitepaper and no working testnet sold out a nine-figure raise before most participants finished reading the terms. Regulators are already asking questions.
LayerX, a zero-knowledge rollup project backed by a roster of pseudonymous contributors and one former Jump Crypto engineer, closed its $420 million hard cap in approximately 14 minutes of active sale on Wednesday. The pace of the raise — and the sparseness of the disclosed materials — has drawn immediate comparisons to the 2017 ICO era that the industry spent years trying to outgrow.
The disclosure
Investors committed stablecoins to a contract whose audit was published less than 72 hours before launch. The whitepaper is three pages long. The team is anonymous save for one Twitter/X handle with fewer than 9,000 followers. None of these details slowed the raise.
The regulators
Two regulators — one in the EU and one in Asia — have informally asked the project for documentation regarding jurisdictional restrictions on the sale. LayerX's contract appears to have geo-blocked U.S. IP addresses. It did not geo-block VPNs.
"If you have to ask whether it's an investment contract, it is." — A former SEC enforcement attorney who requested anonymity
LayerX's token, XRL, begins trading on tier-1 exchanges next Monday.
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