![image](https://img.esteem.ws/x2vqlpei2z.jpg)
"Greed brings attention to things," Manu Sporny says.

He's thought about this for some time, brainstorming the pros and cons of an immensely popular, yet flagrantly hyped new mechanism for raising money - the initial coin offering (ICO).

So, today, Sporny and his team at Digital Bazaar, a successful software provider 15 years in the making, are launching the Veres One identity blockchain without its own token.

The project isn't ready for general availability just yet, but is being released for testing and tweaking (should bugs be found in the code).

However, what seems most notable, especially in today's frothy crypto ecosystem of multimillion-dollar token raises, is that Digital Bazaar's identity blockchain does not need an ICO, it does not need a token.


"Our goal is not attention seeking, it's trying to build the most cost-effective infrastructure for this thing," Sporny said.

And that infrastructure needs to clean up the mess that is digital identity today, where large, powerful gatekeepers control the system and keep silos of data that have proven vulnerable to data breaches. Not only that, but an identity blockchain needs to be a global public utility that everyone - even the poorest of the poor in developing nations - can benefit from.

Yet, how could that dream come to fruition if the platform's token is being pumped and dumped and speculated on rampantly every day, in turn making the fees to operate and use the network unpredictable?

As such, the Digital Bazaar team designed Veres One as a public, permissionless distributed ledger where three groups of stakeholders work together to keep the system running: nodes that run that software, maintainers that develop the software continually and a diverse (both gender-wise, ethnically, culturally and geographically) board of governors that sets the operational rules of the network that maintainers then execute on.

All these groups will provide checks and balances on each other, according to Sporny.