Bain, Lightspeed Back First ICO With $133 Million Basis Funding

Announced Wednesday, Basis has raised $133 million in an initial coin offering, a round that featured an all-star cast of investors originally first revealed by CoinDesk back in October.

Lightspeed Ventures made its first token investment ever with the Basis round.

Basis also convinced Bain Capital Ventures, the venture arm of Bain Capital, to make its first investment in tokens.

Stepping back, Basis is built on the idea that, fundamentally, central banks basically know how to keep a currency stable, but they tend to screw it up through human error.

So Basis sets out to use the same operations that central banks use, but control them with software, not brains.

Basis uses simple supply and demand to manage the price of its currency.

Basis will need that technical talent as it builds a set of products that it hopes will build interest and buzz that will lead to regular people using its new currency.

Basis is not even close to the first project targeting that issue.

Al-Naji had been working on ways to help bring stability to bitcoin for years, alongside the fellow Princeton students who would become his founding teammates at Basis.

"The other big reason why we like 'basis' is we want Basis to be the fundamental unit of account, the basis of all value."