BitTorrent token public offering sells out in minutes, would have been "seconds" if not for technical issues

A $7.2 million public token sale for BitTorrent (BTT) sold out in less than 20 minutes on crypto exchange Binance earlier this morning. According to a tweet from Changpeng Zhao "CZ", CEO of Binance, the sale was met with "astronomical" demand, and if not for a system issue would have taken a "few seconds" to sell out instead of 18 minutes.

Acquired by Tron last summer, BitTorrent's token BTT is a TRON TRC-10 token used to provision different services in the BitTorrent ecosystem. In a sale document posted on Binance Launchpad, the public sale offered ~6 percent of the the total token supply at a rate of 1BTT to .00012 USD, with a $20,000 individual cap and 100,000 BTT minimum. The sale was provisioned across two funding pairs, with 40% of the sale allocated to Binance's BNB token, and the remaining 60% allocated for Tron's TRX.

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While the sale was met with heavy demand, Binance's systems faced technical issues that prevented many users from funding the sale. "The issue experienced today was caused by the "user agreement confirmation" button caching/locking. Most of the stress tests focused on the buy process, this part was not covered thoroughly enough," CZ tweeted. According to data on Binance's site there were ~620 contributors to the TRX session, and ~340 contributors on the BNB session.

Meanwhile, Tron is planning on doing a small airdrop of BTT tokens for people who tried to place orders but couldn't get them filled because of the technical issues. "Due to overwhelming demands, Tron team generously agreed to do a small airdrop for people who tried to place orders, but was not successful in buying. Exact numbers will be published soon," CZ said on Twitter.

Update: "We’re delighted by the overwhelming response from the community on our first Launchpad project of the year. Admittedly, we underestimated user demand and while requests were processed in order on the back end, there were caching delays on the front end. We’ll make sure the front-end technical issues are ironed out before our next token launch. We are more excited than ever to continue supporting projects on Launchpad and will be announcing upcoming token launches soon," a Binance spokesperson told The Block.

About Author

Ryan Todd is a research analyst at The Block where he focuses on the convergence of fintech and digital assets. Previously he worked at Deutsche Bank as an equity analyst covering consumer finance and payments companies, and also spent time at ConsenSys exploring the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Ryan holds a BS in Economics and Accounting/Finance from Florida State University, and MS Finance from Vanderbilt University.