The Antshares blockchain ICO in early August.

AntShares is holding its second ICO in early August.

The Antshares blockchain will be used to register digital assets. Asset owners can digitize many different types of assets, which then can be traded on the AntShares blockchain.

The team’s approach to asset registration involves tokenizing proofs of ownership over that asset, not trying to represent the asset itself through a token. In other words, a token on the Antshares blockchain represent a standard legal proof-of-ownership accepted in modern society rather than trying to substitute for it. They plan to list private company equities immediately on launching Antshares, with more companies to follow.

The crowdsale itself will involve buying Antshares (ANS). ANS will be one method of acquiring Antcoins (ANC), which are used to actually register assets. Both Antshares and Antcoins will be tradeable and Antshare holders will be able to acquire Antcoins through block creation.[1] More on the consensus protocol below.

This ICO has a unique refund feature. The BTC raised will go into a 2/3 multisig escrow account, and the development team won’t touch it until the Antshares chain is launched. At any point up until the launch of the final blockchain, participants can request to withdrawal their BTC.

Antshares held its first ICO back in October 2015. The ICO lasted for 10 days and raised 2,100 BTC. Since then, they have grown from a team of 4 to a team of 12, and they still have funds left from that sale. The development team will also run a separate company call Onchain that will serve as a marketing and consulting entity for the Antshares chain. Anyone can use Antshares without Onchain, but they can provide support to entities who want assistance.

The code underlying Antshares was written from scratch and is the only blockchain based in China that started as open-source. The code is posted on GitHub, with the first commit posted May 2015.