Gladius Network
It reported its own ICO to the SEC, then ran out of money
A Washington, D.C. startup building a blockchain network on which content providers would spend GLA tokens on spare bandwidth and storage, pooled from individuals and businesses, to fight off DDoS attacks.
- Capital raised (announced)
- Estimated
Recorded announced backing; this is separate from cash received, customer deposits and money recovered.
- Buyers in the public sale
Public-sale buyers, October–December 2017, from the SEC order summarized by Harvard; not ongoing product users.
Funding
| Round | Date | Announced | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLA token sale | Unknown | Not disclosed |
Announced is what was said at the time. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed and is not assumed to match.
People
| Name | Role | Period | Now | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alex Godwin | — | Not established | Oct 2026 |
Timeline
July 2017
13 December 2017
The public sale had opened on 13 October 2017, after a white paper published in late September.
August 2018
About six months after distributing the tokens, the company contacted the SEC's Division of Enforcement about a possible securities-law violation.
20 February 2019
The SEC issued a cease-and-desist order finding that the 2017 sale was an unregistered offer and sale of securities. Citing the self-report and cooperation, it imposed no civil penalty. Gladius agreed, without admitting or denying the findings, to register the GLA token as a class of securities and to offer refunds to buyers who purchased before 31 December 2017.
November 2019
How it ended
Ran out of money
Gladius told its Telegram channel that it had ceased operations effective immediately and filed for dissolution, saying that despite its best efforts it no longer had funds to continue. It left its code on GitHub for three months for anyone who wanted to pursue it. A deadline to register its tokens under the SEC settlement had passed a week earlier, and reports could not say whether the registration statement was ever filed.
Still alive
Open spot
Gladius Network is gone. Is your storage network still running?
Spotlight your project here.
Sources
6 sources behind this page.
- 1SEC Issues First ICO Enforcement Action Against a Self-Reporting Token Issuer · Cleary Gottlieb
- 2Unregistered ICO Issuer Gladius Shuts Down 9 Months After SEC Settlement · CoinDesk · Nov 2019
- 3Gladius Network shuts down as ICO investors cry foul · Decrypt · Nov 2019
- 4SEC Enforcement Against Self-Reporting Token Issuer · Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance · Mar 2019
- 5Gladius Escapes Fines for Unregistered ICO after Self-Reporting to the SEC · The National Law Review
- 6Crypto firm that raised $12.7M with ICO admits it ran out of money, closes doors · The Next Web · Nov 2019
Every figure above is clickable and opens the sources behind it. Copies were stored when each source was read, so a citation still resolves after the page it came from is gone.