I.C.Os. (Initial Coin Offerings): far from fail-safe

NYT article ” How Floyd Mayweather Helped Two Young Guys From Miami Get Rich” by Nathaniel Popper makes you wonder why these unregistered securities offerings even exist as they do and are nothing but smokescreens.

Boxer Floyd Mayweather endorsed an ICO offering of a company named Centra that raised $30 MM. By all accounts, not only the company appears running on flimsy wheels, but its owners have questionable backgrounds.

“For now, the bigger problem facing Mr. Sharma and Mr. Trapani [the owners of Centra] is the perjury indictment by a Manhattan grand jury on Oct. 5, just a few days after Centra finished fund-raising.”

The problem here is celebrities like Mayflower are endorsing ICOs with such loose controls, it puts shame to shame.

“Celebrities have helped stoke the I.C.O. boom. The actor Jamie Foxx, the socialite Paris Hilton and the soccer player Luis Suarez, for example, have all promoted new virtual currencies to their sizable followings on social media in recent months, offering legitimacy and attention to coin offerings that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Mr. Mayweather, who has promoted three different tokens — Centra, Stox and Hubiits — has even taken to calling himself Crypto Mayweather in social media posts, a play on his better-known nickname, Money Mayweather.”

Mayweather’s involvement with Centra is however, disputed:

“He’ll do anything we ask,” Mr. Trapani said. “He’ll go shopping around Beverly Hills if we ask him to do it with this card.”

The boxing champ understood their deal differently. A spokeswoman for Mr. Mayweather, Kelly Swanson, said he had been paid in cash for the posts and was not involved in any continuing relationship with Centra. She did not say how much he had been paid.

After being contacted by The Times, Mr. Mayweather deleted his Instagram and Facebook posts endorsing Centra, though he left up a Twitter post.”