Presenting the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for Tezos, a blockchain startup which has tapped a virtually unlimited source of funding, and has raised over $200 million in just four days. Tezos is already the biggest ICO in history and with the sale scheduled to continue for another 8 days, may end up raising over half a billion dollars.

Recently, blockchain startup Block.One hit a record funding, raising around $185 million in the first five days of the crowdsale. Prior to that, another startup, called Bancor, netted nearly $150 million in contributions during the first three hours of its ICO.

What makes Tezos different from a recent surge in similar such offerings, is that this ICO is not based on Ethereum and instead operates on an entirely new blockchain, a "self-amending cryptoledger" that rewards developers who upgrade the network's protocols and allows for "seamless," consensual upgrades of those protocols (read the white paper here for more detail). Which, as Mashable points out, makes it a competitor to Ethereum.