The Bancor Project Monday raised approximately $153 million in an “initial coin offering” of the digital currency Ether, according to its website.

“In what is now a historic Token Generation Event, 10,885 participants contributed 396,720 Ether,” Bancor wrote. Ether is the native currency on the Etherium platform. The original timeframe was only one hour, but the blockchain startup extended that to three hours after site problems occurred due to “overwhelming demand and traffic, and massive malicious attacks.”

The Bancor “smart token” allows users to hold and exchange multiple cryptocurrencies in reserve, enabling “any party to instantly purchase or liquidate the smart token in exchange for one of its reserve tokens, directly through the smart token’s contract, at a continuously calculated price, according to a formula which balances buy and sell volumes,” according to its white paper.

Bancor created 79,323,978 of its own network tokens, or BNT, to be exchanged for Ether, and according to CoinDesk 50 percent were sold to the investors. One buyer was said to have bought $27 million worth of BNT.

The white paper also said some 20 percent of the tokens went to partnerships, community grants and public bounties, 20 percent went to the operating budget of Bancor’s foundation, and 10 percent went to founders, team members, advisers and early contributors.

A notable investor was venture capitalist Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who said his company was exploring “the possibility of issuing a VC Token for our diverse network of investors, entrepreneurs, local and global businesses.” Blockchain Capital also invested, stating, “We loved how Bancor spent over a year developing their MVP, put it out on their private testnet and used their own application and smart tokens to run their bounty programs.”

The startup did meet with criticism regarding the site problems during the sale of tokens, with buyers unsure of how the value of their tokens might be affected. Multiple users were met with error pages while others transactions didn’t go through after long “payment pending” periods.

The ICO beats that of the $152 million the Decentralized Autonomous Organization raised last year, funds that were subsequently depleted in what was called a massive cryptocurrency heist.

Image: Bancor