The original intention of Ethereum was to raise roughly 35 million USD.
With 18,559,839 ETH sold at 2,000 ETH/BTC that comes up to 5.3 million USD invested so far.
In contrast MAIDsafe raised around 6 million USD on their own IPO.
These two coins are the strongest competitors in terms of the development resources that are backing the project. The superiority of one over the other is completely debatable.
It is however clear that Ethereum intends/believes that it needs greater funding for development. Ripple is another coin that has strong development support, I recall it initially have VC funding. I am unaware of how much VC funding they received.
The crypto-currency space is becoming now more competitive in that coins are going beyond the simple cut-and-paste clone like Litecoin and moving to coins that are heavily backed by development. It is anybody's guess who will come up on top.
I believe Ripple has raised more money than either Maidsafe or Ethereum so far, at $9 million - and they continue to run new funding rounds on a fairly regular basis so I am sure they will end up raising a lot more than that. And of course that is just VC funding, we don't know how much if any of their XRP they have sold.
Etheruem may well equal that by the end of its sale though, because the way its structured means some people may be waiting till the end of the sale to see how expensive its become before deciding how much, if any, to buy.
Do you recall how much Mastercoin was able to raise?
A strong development organization or community is critical for any crypto-currency. They've been many complaints that the Bitcoin development community lacks funding.
Ethereum is promising in that at least they have their development funding squared away. The same can be said about Maidsafe.
Money of course doesn't guarantee success. Mastercoin a while ago had a massive war chest, unfortunately I think their development is dropping the ball.
Counterparty runs a lean staff, they've done much better than Mastercoin despite less development funds.
Bytecoin/Monero seem to have active developers, however there seems to be some infighting going on over there.
Development funding is a doubled edged sword, if you raise too much then your valuation may be to high for any investor to make a profit. That is my current concern with Ethereum.
I think the complaints about Bitcoin are unwarranted, the developers all have tens of thousands of bitcoins from the early days. I don't know of any developers that have joined in the last year or two where bitcoin's have actually cost lots of money to buy. All these people have an incentive to keep Bitcoin in the leading position, as it means they will become mega multi millionaires as opposed to being just being millionaires. Also all the lead developers of Bitcoin will probably never admit to how many cpu mined bitcoins they own, but that is ok, that is the way it should be.
There is infighting over Bytecoin and Monero, only because Bytecoin had 80% of the entire eventual supply of coins mined before being released publicly. (The difficulty for all of Bytecoin's life up until being announced on this forum suggests about 10 - 30 computers were mining it from the beginning)
EDIT: There isn't really in-fighting, that tiff taff ended a while ago, we just wanted people to know why Monero was created in the first place, it was to address the premine by the Bytecoin team, that is all.
Anyway, back to talking about Ethereum:
The funding is only a double edged sword if it doesn't grow the value of the pie at a larger rate than the investor's share of the pie being reduced.
So if Ethereum raises $10 million and that gives enough funds to make a product that scales to $10 billion, then cool. However...
...if Ethereum raises $50 million, and that gives enough funds to make a product that scales to $100 billion, then even better, you might own 5 times LESS of the overall pie of Ethereum on day one, but if that funding allowed the team to hire someone that figured out a way to make Ethereum scale even better then you're getting more than 2 times the value even though you own less of the circulation.
