Owner of ICO That Never Happened Attempts to Sell Project on eBay for $60,000

The owner of a startup that never launched its initial coin offering (ICO) is trying to sell the project on eBay for $60,000, according to an offer on the e-commerce website that expires Friday, March 29.

The startup, named “Sponsy,” is described as a blockchain project that is fully prepared to launch both ICO and security token offerings (STO). The author of the offer claims that the project was audited by an investment firm and approved by investment bankers. Moreover, the advertisement states that the solutions developed by Sponsy comply with European Union and United States regulations.

In addition, the project claims to have a “solid social presence,” with over 10,000 likes on Facebook and 8,000 subscribers on Twitter. However, the Twitter page has only been updated twice a month since the company announced its forthcoming token sale last December, and the posts have around ten likes on average. Sponsy has a similar presence on Facebook, with posts randomly commented on by several seemingly bot-like users.

Sponsy also mentions that it is listed by famous ICO trackers such as ICOBench. However, the latter ranks it 2.9, with no experts evaluating the project.

The Financial Times (FT) has reached Ivan Komar, the founder of Sponsy, to find out why the ICO has not yet been launched. Komar explained that the company missed the ICO hype of 2017, and no one became interested in its tokens later in 2019.

According to Komar, his lawyer recommended that he developed the product first instead of launching an ICO — a decision that the entrepreneur now regrets:

“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. And that’s exactly what others were doing.”

However, Komar believes that the project can be successfully sold, especially due to the fact that the crypto part can be easily removed from it. He also admits that institutional “approval” is quite a strong statement:

“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.”

The overwhelming popularity of ICOs in 2017 and early 2018 was described by the crypto industry as “hype,” but nowadays many experts believe the ICO boom is now over. During Q3 2018 — from July to September 2018 — ICO funding overall has fallen by 48 percent.