This start-up raised $153million in just three hours

Initial coin offering is now a new and potentially explosive way to raise capital for your business.

There’s no filing requirements, no Securities and Exchange Commission rules, no quarterly reporting and no required public disclosures, these are the possible upside this venture offers.

The Israeli-based company is very familiar with digital currencies – so much so that it has developed a unique protocol that can enable just about anyone to develop their own digital “smart tokens” (or cryptocurrency) and then help them to make it marketable by giving it liquidity and a market price from day one.

The company does this by allowing your cryptocurrency to be able to be converted to other currencies (including the U.S. dollar) “through a new kind of economic model which uses an algorithmically discovered price to balance buys and sells” using an “innovative reserve mechanism.”

Bancor’s platform is built on the blockchain, the hot technology that uses a “digital ledger” for chronologically recording movements of money. The blockchain is being looked at closely by most major banks and software companies as a way to more securely manage online transactions.

If you want to do an initial coin offering you first come up with a business plan and then you issue tokens.The tokens are like shares. The investors who buy your tokens hope that your company’s plan succeeds so that the value of your tokens grow. That’s what the investors of Bancor, who include noted venture capitalist, Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, are hoping for.

Bancor issued its own tokens and raised about 390,000 Ethers (a crypto-currency that competes with Bitcoin) in its initial coin offering. That’s $153 million at the current exchange rate. The whole thing happened online and was planned to occur over an hour – but was extended to three due to demand (and delivery backlogs). There were about 11,000 buyers with one purchasing almost $27 million worth of the company’s tokens.