Encrypted E-mail Service ProtonMail Confirms Potential ICO, Calls It ‘Not a Money-Out’

Encrypted e-mail service ProtonMail is “contemplating” launching an Preliminary Coin Providing (ICO), the corporate’s CTO Bart Butler confirmed to Cointelegraph in a press release right this moment, July 23.

Butler additionally wrote on Twitter right this moment –– in response to commentators largely detrimental hypothesis concerning the firm working an ICO based mostly on a job itemizing –– that the corporate is “exploring issuing a token as an alternative choice to conventional VC funding.”

The service’s potential crypto token is evidently to be dubbed “ProtonCoin,” in accordance with what seems to be the challenge’s official website, which was quietly launched on June 19. Based on area registrar service godaddy.com, the protoncoin.com area was created on Feb. 27, 2017, and up to date on Jan. 29, 2018.

The ProtonCoin website gives nearly no particulars concerning the potential token’s performance, technological foundation, and sale logistics. It does nevertheless present a common description of the coin’s “objective,” together with  a “approach for most people to take part within the progress and growth of ProtonMail and the complete Proton ecosystem, centered across the concepts of safety and privateness,” in addition to a deceptive press part that includes articles solely about ProtonMail’s present, core companies.

Regardless of the crypto Twitter neighborhood discussing the potential for an ICO from ProtonMail solely right this moment, the corporate’s plans have apparently been within the works for a while. Reddit consumer ProtonMail, evidently the official account of the e-mail supplier, posted in subreddit r/protoncoin as early as March 7 that “ProtonMail workforce does intend to launch a cryptocoin sooner or later.” The challenge additionally has sparsely populated official Twitter and Fb accounts, along with reddit.

An official ProtonMail spokesperson instructed Cointelegraph right this moment that the corporate is as but not sure if they'll proceed with a token sale, clarifying that “if we do it it is going to be inside the yr."

Echoing Butler’s tweet from earlier right this moment, the spokesperson additionally defined to Cointelegraph that the corporate is “viewing this as a substitute fund-raising instrument to VC cash, not as a cash-out."

ProtonMail was developed in 2013 by scientists and engineers on the European Group for Nuclear Analysis (CERN), as said on their web site.  

ProtonMail’s potential token sale is just not the corporate’s first foray into cryptocurrency. The corporate formally introduced that it could settle for Bitcoin (BTC) as a cost technique in August 2017. The announcement additionally famous that the challenge has “all the time been fairly excited about cryptocurrencies and blockchain, as they empower the identical ideas that impressed us to create ProtonMail.”