Halsey Minor has been a busy man in the cryptocurrency world. Uphold, previously BitReserve, was founded by the former Internet billionaire and has grown to become one of the largest Bitcoin companies in the world. Now he is attempting to do something people have been talking about for years: Combining virtual reality and cryptocurrencies.
Voxelus started funding yesterday and is off to a seemingly great start, especially considering the community’s growing IPO fatigue. Including its presale, which concluded on October 31st, the project claims to have raised approximately $451,812 or a bit over 1,108BTC. With its presale grabbing $350,000. That leaves just over $100,000 raised in the presale in less than two days, an impressive number in its own rights.
Voxelus aims to be a virtual reality creation platform and marketplace powered by its own cryptocurrency, aptly named Voxels. It allows people to create content and tools without coding experience while utilizing either their own art assets or the assets available in the store.
Voxelus, like everything Minor has built so far, looks serious about its aspirations. It is already far along enough that they have been able to show off its creation software and some decent looking assets. It will have an uphill battle, however, if it wants to beat game engine/creation tools out there already. Unity, Unreal 4, Source 2 and CryENGINE all have significant portions of the pre-fab game engine market covered and have their eyes on the growing VR market.
Will the cryptocurrency connection and built in marketplace be enough to convince creators to use Voxelus as opposed to one of the other popular engines? It all likely depends on if the Voxelus engine has any significant advantages over its competitor as an engine. It has to either be more accessible, more powerful or be unique in some way outside of the cryptocurrency connection if it wants to make some headway into the incredibly competitive market.
They seem to have the faith of some industry leaders, as the Voxelus private pre-sale generated $350,000 in investments according to Voxelus, with the vast majority of it coming following presentations at Money 20/20 and “Bitcoin Investor conferences” in the past weeks.
Voxelus, unsurprisingly, will utilize Minor’s connections. It will become the second cryptocurrency to join Uphold’s suite of 22 currencies and commodities (the other cryptocurrency being Bitcoin) after its crowdsale is completed. Minor remains the Chairman and “Chief Visionary” at Uphold. Through Uphold, customers will be able to buy Voxels using a variety of payment methods, including Credit Cards, wire transfer and of course, Bitcoin.
The price of Voxels was 1000 for 1BTC at the start of the crowdsale yesterday, but has risen to 900 for 1BTC since and will continue to rise in price as the crowdsale continues. The backend of the crowdsale is being handled by ShapeShift.io, who previously handled the (very successful) Augur crowdsale.
There have been a lot of IPOs in the cryptocurrency space, to the point that both the media and much of the community have begun ignoring them. But not all of them are fly by night, and Voxelus, headed by the well-known Minor and with significant work already done, is definitely one worth paying attention to.
Voxelus’ will continue until November 2nd, you can find out more at the campaign’s website.