East Williamsburg’s Airswap raises $36 million in ICO

It would seem there’s big money in cryptocurrency trading.

A new, decentralized trading platform called AirSwap raised the equivalent of $36 million last week, marking one of the largest ICO raises in Brooklyn’s (brief) crypto history.

AirSwap’s product is a decentralized crypto market that’s entirely peer-to-peer and doesn’t take commissions on trades. That decentralization means it’s not exactly an entity that can be hacked, unlike a centralized exchange, such as Mt. Gox.

The startup is part of the ConsenSys family of blockchain startups loosely based out of its East Williamsburg office.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P_Ri28DgkU

“This represents a sea change in how various kinds of exchange will operate in the future,” ConsenSys founder and cocreator of the Ethereum blockchain Joseph Lubin said in a release. (Lubin is also an advisor to AirSwap.) “Swap is putting systems in place for near term exchange use cases and creating the foundation for moving all token exchange activity to a more sound and fully trustworthy infrastructure.”

AirSwap ran shared some data on its raise, finding that a plurality of participants were from the United States, but most were not. The second largest country of investors was the Philippines, where more than 1,000 people bought AirSwap tokens.

Another interesting tidbit on who is doing all this crypto investing: “We were able to determine the ages of our registrants based on their government-issued IDs, the average age being 33.73 years old. The age distribution of our registrants spans ages ranging from 13 to 94.”