Cryptocurrency ICOs have become both a blessing and a plague. On the one hand, anyone can raise substantial amounts of money to make his or her project become a reality. However, there is also a lot of dumb money flowing in from people who do not research projects and hope to get rich overnight. Floyd Mayweather, the undefeated boxing champion, is now caught up in the ICO hype as well.
Floyd Mayweather Advertises Stox ICO
When celebrities get involved in advertising cryptocurrency ICOs, you know things are going from bad to worse. The involvement of Tim Draper in multiple ICOs has created a lot of backlash already. Even though all of those projects reached their crowdsale goals with relative ease, none of them have anything to show for it. It only introduces more dumb money to a sector without regulation or repercussions for failure to deliver on initial promises.
A lot of these ICO projects will fail sooner or later. While there are talented individuals in this sector, these are vast undertakings which cannot be accomplished just by throwing millions of dollars at them. Many cryptocurrency ICOs are not audited by a third party before their crowdsales begin. To make matters worse, few investors are taking their due diligence seriously.
Earlier this week, an image surfaced on social media explaining how undefeated boxing champion Floyd Mayweather is advertising the upcoming Stox ICO. This project will go live on August 2nd, although very few people have heard about the project up until now. While it is true that cryptocurrency ICOs can spur a new wave of innovation, paying a celebrity for a few hashtags will not make projects successful. Whether or not the Stox ICO will fare any differently remains to be seen.
People tend to forget that most celebrities who sign such a sponsorship deal do not even know what the project is about. If anyone were to ask Mayweather in person what Stox is about, he probably would not be able to explain it. Indeed, a celebrity endorsement is not a validation for upcoming projects looking to raise millions of dollars.
Mayweather also claimed that he would make a “shit ton of money on the Stox ICO.” Even if Mayweather were to buy shares — which has not been confirmed — he will need the token price to go up significantly. This could hint at a future pump-and-dump scheme for the Stox platform. This is not the most legitimate way to advertise a “revolutionary” project.
But what is Stox? It will serve as a prediction market platform. We have seen multiple projects in this area already, including Augur. The entire Stox project will be based on Bancor’s smart token protocol. Bancor is another cryptocurrency ICO that raised millions and only has an alpha product of a front end product. Their development plan seems solid but only time will tell if things play out properly. Bancor’s BNT token is seemingly appreciated so far, although most ICO speculators look for quick flips rather than believing in projects long-term. The project has a hard cap of US$30 million, which is relatively small. It is hard to make a “shit ton of money” from such a small project.
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