07/11/2017 – Chaineum, the first French ICO boutique, and Lightyear.io, an organization that supports partner activities for Stellar, an open source blockchain network, have announced a partnership to collaborate in the ICO space. Through the partnership, Chaineum will use the Stellar network to support some of its upcoming ICOs.

Founded by Laurent Leloup, an expert in blockchain and corporate finance, Chaineum is positioned as the first "ICO Boutique" in France, providing a range of end-to-end services to companies and international start-ups wishing to develop with this new funding mechanism. Chaineum is preparing 8 ICOs by the end of 2017, for European, North American and Asian companies, of which cumulative amount could reach € 200 million.

“Stellar is an excellent choice for any ICO that does not require Turing-complete smart contracts and can benefit from the immediate creation of a secondary market,” said Laurent Leloup, Chaineum CEO. “First, there is a simple, easy-to-use built-in token issuance system that is accessible to anyone. It also features a decentralized exchange where any Stellar network token can be instantly traded without relying on a third-party exchange to list the token.”

“The ICO model promotes global financial inclusion by democratizing fundraising, investment and network participation,” said Brit Yonge, cofounder of Lightyear.io. “We’re looking forward to working with Chaineum to help entrepreneurs, who are working on positive-impact projects to explore Stellar as a platform to further global participation in fundraising and blockchain usage.”

Benefits of the Stellar blockchain:

• Stellar is based on a consensus algorithm rather than mining. This means transactions confirm in a few seconds.

• Transactions on the Stellar network are nearly free: currently, 1 USD covers 2.5 million transactions.

• Stellar facilitates transactions in a variety of currencies, including both fiat and digital.

• Depending on hardware and network configurations, a conservative estimate of Stellar’s processing rate is 1000 operations per second.

• The median transaction time on Stellar is 5 seconds, compared to approximately 3.5 minutes on Ethereum.

Stellar benefits for ICOs

Traditionally, ICO tokens have been issued on the Ethereum network in the form of ERC20 tokens. ERC20 tokens are easy to issue and are infinitely customizable using Ethereum’s smart contracting language.

However, recent events have highlighted and exacerbated some weaknesses of the network, including slow transaction processing times for the network during ICOs and increasingly expensive gas prices (by fiat standards) for transactions and smart contract execution.

Moreover, many organizations require only basic tokens; they adopt the risk of Ethereum’s Turing complete programming language without taking advantage of many of its benefits.

While Ethereum has the most expressive programming capabilities, Stellar is the best choice for ICOs that require simple and secure smart contract features. Stellar’s primary goal is to facilitate issuing and trading tokens, especially those tied to legal commitments by known organizations, such as claims on real-world assets or fiat currency.

Among key benefits of Stellar for ICOs:

• Stellar offers a simple, easy-to-use built-in token issuance system that is accessible to anyone.

• Stellar offers built-in token capabilities that can support multi-signature authorizations, generate dividends, limit who can hold tokens, impose lockup/vesting periods, and more.

• Stellar features a decentralized exchange where any Stellar network token can be instantly traded without relying on a third-party exchange to list the token. This means newly issued tokens can be traded on Day 1. Any token created on Stellar can be bought and sold immediately on Stellar’s decentralized exchange by means of Stellar’s native offer mechanism. An organization does not have to rely on a third-party exchange like Bittrex or Poloniex to list or make the market for them.

• In addition, from a security point of view, Stellar’s model of atomic multi-operation transactions leads to more auditable code, limits uncertainty, and decreases the risk of harm from bad actors who may exploit program vulnerabilities. Moreover, Stellar optionally allows issuers to reserve the ability to freeze tokens in the event there is misuse.

Stellar is an excellent choice for any ICO that does not require Turing-complete smart contracts and can benefit from immediate creation of a secondary market.