2018-11-15 15:40 |
Colin Kruger recently wrote an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, where he outlined the story of a famous cricket captain known as Michael Clarke and a moribund organization known as Global Tech Exchange.
This organization, Global Tech Exchange was meant to run an AI based crypto trading and machine learning platform. To that end, they wanted to raise $50 million AUD, which would be used for customer support and knowledge creation purposes.
In the process, however, they made a wrong move when they nominated Michael Clarke, whose tweet about the ICO generated a lot of raucous from the local financial organizations. This eventually led to Australia’s indigenous regulatory authority –the Australian Securities and Investment Commission- investigating the ICO and decreeing that it didn’t meet up with regulatory standards, which included protecting the investors.
The fallout of the investigation, resulted in Global Tech dissolving its operations and reimbursing all monies it had collected from investors so far.
Many welcomed this development, unlike the case of Centra Tech which was faced with a lawsuit of scam and financial misappropriation alongside their celebrity advocates like DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather.
The good thing is that Australian investors in Global Tech didn’t have to go through the lengthy process of trying to retrieve their investments, as did Centra Tech’s investors. While this happened, it doesn’t mean that Global Tech wasn’t a legitimate company with good intentions. It was just the modus operandi, as well as its spokesperson that sucked.
In the case of Centra Tech, DJ Khaled and Mayweather should be blamed for the court charges leveled against them. This is because they got involved with Centra Tech as consumer-level investors.
This aptly means that celebrities are supposed to only recommend products and services to their fans or suffer the implications. Even though approvals from celebrities are a tested and trusted marketing strategy, it doesn’t mean they can recommend just about anything to their followers. In fact, when it comes to policies and securities, there should be consequences when they recommend bad or flawed products and things go bad.
While things didn’t go well with Global Tech, Kruger’s article cites examples of organizations that were funded by ICOs and are doing well, in spite of the regulations in the country. One of these organizations is known as Power Ledger, which intends to create a free p2p electricity market. This way, people sell power to each other directly, instead of relying on an energy company for power or electricity.
The co-founder of Power Ledger, Jemma Green stated that they are focused on a mission in the work they are doing; and this is the reason people are responding positively. Currently, Power Ledger has been launched in other locations and looks poised to be one of the few ICO projects that will succeed in this space.
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