Gnosis Tokens Double in Value After Exchange Debut

The price of tokens sold as part of a fundraiser for the decentralized prediction market project Gnosis is on the rise following their release to auction participants today.

At the time of writing, GNO tokens were trading for over 0.0455 BTC ($64) on the cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex, a move that represents a more than doubling in value over just a few hours of live trading.

The increased activity appears so far driven by the quick actions taken by major exchanges to list the cryptographically secure asset. GNO holders, for example, can now trade the token on San Francisco-based Kraken, with trading pairs denominated in bitcoin, ether, US dollars and the euro.

Kraken was swiftly followed by Poloniex today, which announced support for GNO/BTC and GNO/ETH trading pairs. (Poloniex does not offer fiat trading).

However, at press time, it seems that GNO tokens were having trouble finding demand at current prices, with well over 1,000 BTC of unfulfilled buy orders at time of writing.

Muted reaction

Still, the release today follows a controversial sale in which the mechanisms used to incentivize buyers pushed the total valuation of the token supply to $300m even though only 4% of the tokens were sold.

In a statement following the conclusion of the auction, Gnosis founder Martin Köppelmann said that the team was "humbled" by the community's support, and outlined a roadmap for the coming months and years.

"We strongly believe that this distribution will benefit all token holders by ensuring we have sufficient tokens to incentivize ecosystem growth," he wrote in response to concerns about the lopsided initial distribution.

Currently, 99% of the tokens held by Gnosis have been locked for a period of a year.

"These tokens are held for the purposes of incentivizing projects building on top of Gnosis and to bring in additional funding or token distribution for the project if necessary," Köppelmann wrote.

After the initial boost in trading, eyes are now likely to fall on upcoming announcements concerning the remaining 95% of tokens currently held by the Gnosis team.

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