Wanchain turned fragmented financial databases into a $36M ICO

In late 2016, Factom co-founder and former CTO Jack Lu left to create Wanchain. The startup originated in Asia but put its headquarters in Austin, an emerging crypto hub with a strong technology community and lower operating costs than the coasts.

Wanchain chose to attack a concrete financial-services problem: databases did not communicate well, leaving the industry slow, manual and expensive. Its platform built on Ethereum with Monero-style privacy and cross-chain capabilities, aiming to let exchanges, lending platforms and asset-management tools run as smart contracts.

About a year after the company was created, its Wancoin ICO raised approximately 120,000 ETH, worth about $36 million at the time. Crunchbase News described it as one of 2017's largest ICOs and estimated the ETH at roughly $120 million when it wrote the article.

Wanchain raised approximately 120,000 ETH, valued at about $36M at the ICO; the article estimated that ETH at roughly $120M.

Financial institutions were operating with databases that did not communicate with one another.

The existing process was slow, manual and expensive.

Privacy addressed the weakness of fully transparent ledgers while cross-chain capability addressed interoperability.

Austin offered a growing technical community and a lower burn rate for crypto startups.

A narrow technical wedge—privacy plus cross-chain connectivity—can make a slow, expensive interoperability problem legible to users and investors.

At the time of the report, Wancoins were expected to list on exchanges in the first quarter of 2018. The demonstrated result was the fundraise and its marked value, while banking, lending and asset-management applications remained the platform's stated future uses.