And it just gets better from there.
From FT Alphaville:
Earlier this year, we brought you news that Scottish lingerie entrepreneur-turned Conservative peer Michelle Mone and her businessman boyfriend Doug Barrowman were launching an initial coin offering (ICO). The plan was to raise money for a token-based crowdfunding venture, EQUI Capital....MUCH MORE
But the project has ended in a fiasco that exposes the total absence of oversight in the ICO market, and in particular the lack of protection for those at the bottom of the crypto, er, FUDchain: “bounty-hunters” -- essentially online marketers who promote ICOs on social media and across the internet, supposedly in return for digital tokens.
EQUI told us in February they hoped to raise up to $80m. Even if they raised less than that, the token offering would be “going live” no matter what, Barrowman said.
Lady Mone of Mayfair, OBE, calling herself “one of the biggest experts in Cryptocurrency and Blockchain”, told Business Insider that she and Barrowman were staking their “incredible reputations” on the ICO and that there was “no way [they were] going to do anything untowards (sic) to let these people down”.
The reassurance might have been welcome, because initial coin offerings are effectively an unregulated way for companies to raise money from the public, bypassing securities laws designed to protect investors through the use of so-called cryptocurrencies.
Regulators may yet step in, with those in the US indicating the rules still apply to what are securities in all but name. For now the ICO boom has prompted a flourishing in the number of businesses offering tokens, with more than $6.8bn raised so far this year alone, according to icodata.io, which tracks the market.
The EQUI ICO didn't go quite to plan, however. It isn't going live, and lots of people seem to be feeling pretty let down. (But as you will see, dear reader, we wouldn't want to say it failed, because EQUI are watching, and they're going to tell our editor, and we might get sued.)
After launching a two-week pre-sale a on March 1, with a minimum required investment of $100,000, EQUI put out a press release on March 6 boasting that it had raised a nice, round $7m “in only a few days”. Barrowman said in a statement at the time:
Trading has been frenetic, with investments ranging from the minimum hundred thousand dollar threshold up to a solid couple of million per investment.Then, having still only apparently raised $7m on March 30, EQUI announced the “good news” that it would be extending the public ICO -- minimum investment $100 -- until June 30 (having originally planned to close it on April 12).
By the end of June, the total amount raised still seems to have been stuck at $7m. At that point, EQUI decided to abandon the ICO idea altogether and to relaunch, on September 18, as “EQUI Global”. It is still promising to be the “ULTIMATE DISRUPTOR TO TRADITIONAL VENTURE CAPITAL INVESTING”, the logo looks the same, and the founders are pretty much the same -- Mone, Barrowman plus one other “soon to be announced” (more on that below). But there is no initial coin offering.
The ICO World Of Business is a very strange place of doing business...
