Name: Are ICO Celebrity Endorsements Fair Play?
Uploaded: 2018-04-06
Duration: 3 min 43 s
Description: DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather recently promoted Centra, which has been charged with fraud by the SEC.

[ MUSIC ] So I wanted to start off by talking about this ongoing SEC crackdown in inital coin offerings. There was the big news this week, they made two arrests of the co- founders of an ICO called Centra that was backed and promoted by people like Floyd Mayweather, DJ Khalid. David, you've invested in companies that have done ICOs. What do you make of all this? Well crypto's a wild space, up and down the whole stack and certainly one of the most wild spaces of it all is initial coin offerings. Very little information given to buyers. Not a lot of regulation really none in the U. S. up til now. Investors aren't protected, not a lot of disclosure. So it's kinda a messy space. It's inevitable that a bunch of different U. S. regulatory authorities are going to put some rules and regulations around this and. And hopefully go after bad actors. There have been a number of bad actors in the crypto space. So this is good. The space should be cleaned up. But a lot of times we lose sight of the fact that there is an incredible innovation happening in the space that the notion of pre- selling coins can serve a really interesting purpose to diversify access or democratize access. To technology and allow other people to participate in wealth creation that they wouldn't get to participate in. So we hope you don't through the baby out with the bath water here. But it's important to get some regulation around this stuff .>> I got to say we've seen some of these celebrities posting the Instagram the Snapchat they got like Champagne bottles they're popping off, fat stacks of cash on private jets, it's crazy and it's really not a good look I think because they're duping consumers, people who don't know any better who think look my favourite star is getting rich. Which I'm going to get rich too if I invest in this thing .>> And it's not just celebrities either. We say John Macafey from the anti- virus software .>> Debatbly a celebrity .>> Yes, well he's actually taking getting paid $ 105, 000 per tweet to promote an ICO. So can you really trust somebodies opinion whose really just makijg money to promote it to other people ?>> Yeah pump and dump schemes for stocks, particularly penny stocks I remember during the dotcom days in 1999, 1998, there were all sorts of [ UNKNOWN ], IPOs, and companies that were pursuing reverse mergers to become publicly listed and then pump up stock prices. And they really had no business being public nor do they have a business. So this behavior happens whenever there's Wealth creation, an easy money and it's also paints the entire space negatively. But we wanna find ways to get this bad behavior away from the ecosystem as quickly as possible. And it's not just the regulator source stepping in here, we've also seen big tech companies, Google, and Twitter [ UNKNOWN ] block cryprocurrency ads. Actually, Google said this week that Chrome extensions will no longer be able to mine cryptocurrency Even Mail Chimp has blocked all cryptocurrency newsletters. I think there are bad actors in the space. And so as a platform, like if you're Google or a email platform like Mail Chimp, you want to keep your platform clean, and get the bad actors off of it. Sometimes that takes some work. It's just a little bit too convenient for my taste to see a platform ban an entire ecosystem or entire market segment just because they don't wanna spend the time figuring out who the bad actors are. We're talking about Highly centralized platforms who in theory have the most [ UNKNOWN ] from the advantage of decentralized technologies and platforms. So- Even that's what entirely would block chains in cryptocurrencies afford to route around big centralized entities. Yeah. So it kinda underlines the point of why Alternative structures for platforms are needed, because on a whim a single platform can ban an entire market. [ MUSIC ]

DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather recently promoted Centra, which has been charged with fraud by the SEC.

Are ICO Celebrity Endorsements Fair Play?

Finance

Initial coin offerings are controversial.