Founder tries to sell failed crypto project on eBay

A "blockchain" business that never sold a single token in its initial coin offering is now for sale on eBay. For $60,000, a lucky buyer may get a project that “has everything in place to conduct a successful ICO/STO campaign.” The founder of the Sponsy project, Ivan Komar, serves as a perfect example of why the Great Crypto Bubble of 2017-2018 had to burst, Financial Times writes.

According to Komar, it all went wrong because the company hired a lawyer. “[O]ur lawyer basically told us that we should not launch any ICO before we built a real product that might have some users," Komar said. "And I asked him why, because I saw so many ICOs out there who did not have any idea for any product, yet they managed to raise tens of millions of dollars.”

THE SCOOP

Keep up with the latest news, trends, charts and views on crypto and DeFi with a new biweekly newsletter from The Block's Frank Chaparro

By signing-up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
By signing-up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

If Komar could have a do-over, he would not listen to his lawyer. He believes from the business point of view, running "a token sale as soon as possible, to jump into this crypto craze bandwagon" would have been the right choice. He believes, by the time the product was ready in mid-2018, there was no market for his ICO.  

Moreover, Komar admits the blockchain project did not require any decentralisation. In fact, it could very well run on a centralised platform, with no need for tokenisation. However, the startup promoted itself as “Decentralized Sponsorship Platform.” According to Financial Times, Komar unwittingly managed to describe the “the speciousness and incoherence of the ICO bubble.”