Sophon Raised $60M Through a New Funding Method Node Sale

Reported by Coindesk, it's the blockchain industry's latest innovation – not in technology, but in rounding up cash from investors.

Sophon, an entertainment-focused blockchain ecosystem, has attracted more than $60 million in a node sale – a novel form of project fundraising that is catching on in crypto circles as token sales come under greater scrutiny from securities regulators.

The Sophon project, built as a rollup network atop the Ethereum blockchain using technology from the zkSync project, sold about 121,000 network nodes, netting some 20,391 ETH ($62.7 million), according to a data dashboard on the blockchain-analytics website Dune. A total of 200,000 nodes were offered in the sale.

Technically, buyers purchased Ethereum-based ERC-721 tokens, or NFTs, allowing them to operate nodes. That in turn qualifies them to collectively earn 20% of the project's eventually-to-be-released SOPH tokens over the first 36 months after the network's main launch, expected in the third quarter of this year.

Underscoring the explicitly financial aspects of running a node on Sophon, project officials acknowledged in the press release that the network doesn't even need the full 200,000 nodes. Users don't have to actively operate the nodes themselves.

"They can simply delegate and reap the rewards for it," according to the press release. "Furthermore, the node licenses that are unsold and unused when the sale ends won't come into circulation and will be burned."