BENQI starts its much-awaited ICO after raising $6 million
A decentralized non-custodial liquidity market protocol BENQI enables its users to easily lend, borrow, or earn interest with their digital assets. Built on Avalanche, this protocol gained lots of interest in the market. Depositors providing liquidity to the protocol can earn passive income, and borrowers can borrow in an over-collateralized manner.
BENQI has already completed strategic funding round, managing to raise a total of $6 million. Among the investors were Ascensive Assets, Dragonfly Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, TRGC, Mechanism Capital, Spartan Group, and Woodstock Fund. Other backers were Morningstar Ventures, Ava Labs, Genblock Capital, Rarestone Capital, GBV Capital, Moon Inc, and leading liquidity provider Skynet Trading.
The protocol is launching its native QI token on April 28, 2021. QI oversees the entire BENQI ecosystem, including the Treasury, as well as future iterations of the protocol.
Only QI token holders will be able to vote and participate in BENQI Improvement Proposals (BIPs) discussions to decide the outcome.
While the founding team will govern the protocol initially, they plan to eventually encourage a transition to a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). After becoming part of the DAO, QI token holders could initiate proposals. Moreover, they will be able to vote on issues that will guide the direction of the protocol.
How many tokens are available during the initial coin offering?
A total of 504,000,000 QI will be available for sale during the ICO, starting today. The price is $0.009 per token, and investors can buy Qis on the BENQI platform.
BENQI Protocol aims to help alleviate the congestion on Ethereum. It focuses on creating an ease-of-use platform and offering low fees to its users. According to the founder team, this protocol will enable the birth of open financial applications’ new generation. That will also help to further democratize access to DeFi for the masses.
Avalanche is a highly scalable, decentralized network. It also has sub-second finality capable of handling more than 4500 transactions per second.
Considering that multiple cross-chain bridges are going live and in production (Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, Polkadot, etc.), the team envisions Avalanche to be the decentralized financial settlement layer of choice for the broad range of investors due to its low fees, scalability, decentralization, and compatibility with popular plugin wallets.