26 Mar 2019 Marsha Tusk
How An ICO Ended For Sale On eBay?
The crypto realm took a massive hit after the 2017-2018 crypto downfall, almost eliminating the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) market.
After the drastic price clash in December 2017, the crypto sector suffers still form bearish trends, volatility issues, and low trading volumes. One of the significant casualties of the price lowering is the ICO market collapse, causing companies even to list themselves for sale on sites like eBay.
Sponsy, a blockchain-based, decentralized platform for sponsorship contracts between sponsors and sponsees, recently put its business on the counter for $60,000 on eBay. The reason – not being able to show a real working product amid the crypto avalanche.
Ivan Komar, the founder of Sponsy, spoke in an interview for the Financial Times about their misfortune. Komar stated that listening to his lawyer about not launching an ICO before the real product is delivered is his big mistake with the project. “Everybody was doing the same thing – jumping on the crypto frenzy ride without a product and raising tens of millions of dollars, which I thought at the time is the best strategy, despite my lawyer’s warnings. He was maybe right from a customer point of view, bit from a fundraising perspective, we should have launched the ICO much earlier,” Komar said. The launch date was also mistaken – instead of launching in 2017, when the crypto sector was booming, Sponsy entered the ICO market in the summer of 2018 when the interest in ICOs was almost zero.
Now Komar is taking a completely different approach – he auctions his company on eBay for $60,000. He hopes that the product may be of interest to a blockchain R&D division of a large company, or for example, sell it to an enterprise that is not interested in the crypto sector at all, but want to explore the blockchain functionalities of such platforms. “The blockchain nature of the software is completely detachable, so if you want to build a sponsorship platform without the need of a blockchain, you could do it as a standard centralized server,” Komar explained. “The business model remains untouched if you remove the blockchain component.”, he later added.
In the eBay listing, Komar is listing some bold statements, such as a full set of investment documents, and approval by investment bankers. The truth, however, is that an unknown British law company did evaluate the business model of Sponsy, giving the blockchain company great ranking and low-risk rating. The review, however, must not be mistaken by a fully fledged audit by investment banking.
The $60,000 listing still sees no interest on eBay, although according to Komar, the value of his company should be above $200,000.
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