[Sponsored article]
It was fall 2017 when everyone was still buzzing from the shock and awe of Bitcoin’s meteoric rise. The sharp ascent of the price looked unstoppable, paving the way for many other Initial Coin Offering (ICO) exercises.
Despite the stardom of Bitcoin and a host of seemingly celestial cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Ripple, investors are starting to get cold feet at many projects that tried to raise tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars for seemingly no good reason. Compounding the perception of greed, many early backers were given massive presale bonuses which were then cashed out almost immediately after the tokens became tradeable, which kept token prices down.
Then came Confido, a supposed startup that developed smart contracts to provide escrow payments with shipment tracking features. Unlike traditional escrows which are provided by a third party, a smart contract automatically executes the terms of the agreement through lines written directly into the code.
It was a humble outfit which stated that it only needed US$400,000.
Reuben Yap, project steward of Zcoin and a keen observer of ICOs said: “In a time where ICOs were raising tens of millions of dollars and in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars (Tezos, Filecoin, Sirin Labs), Confido's hard cap raise of US$400,000 was refreshing to investors and added a lot of credibility that this was a legit project that was only raising what it needed.
