The crypto industry is never short of tales that shock and amaze, and this is definitely one of them. One entrepreneur has listed his project for sale on eBay for $60,000. This is an unorthodox method by itself, but it gets more bizarre. The project that the founder is selling once tried an initial coin offering (ICO), but not a single soul was interested.
Ivan Komar founded his blockchain project two years ago. At the time, he was only 19. He wanted to capitalize on the huge amount of funds that investors were directing to blockchain startups. He named his project Sponsy, describing it as a decentralized sponsorship platform.
Komar hired a lawyer to advise him on how to list his project and issue an ICO. However, the lawyer advised him to first develop a viable product first and get people to use it. This was the wrong approach according to Komar who believed that getting the money came first. The Financial Times reached out to him and he explained:
“We hired a lawyer and that was a big mistake for us. Because our lawyer basically told us that we should not launch any ICO before we built a real product that might have some users. 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.”
And he isn’t apologetic for his belief. In fact, given a second chance, Komar insists that he wouldn’t bother to build a product. “We would not have tried to build a product first, we would have tried to run a token sale as soon as possible, to jump into this crypto craze bandwagon, and raise as much money as possible before building any product,” he stated.
In his effort to build a viable product, he missed out on the 2017 ICO hype, something he still regrets. He thus decided to issue his ICO in late 2018. Not surprisingly, interest in the ICO was virtually non-existent. Not a single investor bought the tokens.
However, Komar believes that his project is top notch. This is the reason he has put it up for sale on eBay. However, he has skewed some details about his own project to bait buyers. For example, the listing states that investment bankers have approved the project. By his own admission, Komar lied about this:
“Approved might be a huge word for it. It might be some kind of exaggeration. We did have a law firm based in the UK that ran some sort of audit of our project, and it ranked it, and the rank that we got was pretty high and the risk we got was pretty low.”
He still believes that even with all the mishaps, $60,000 is as generous a price as it can get. The value of the project is somewhere north of $200,000, he boasts.
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