Submitted to DeadCoins.com:"First Failed ICO On Ebay For Sale"
This failed ICO made headlines for being the first known failed project to end up on sale on Ebay. [1,2]
Sponsy is a failed ICO that attempted to launch in the summer of 2018, according to the Financial Times. The proprietor of the crypto project currently has it listed on eBay for a price of $60,000 and says the firm’s biggest mistake was building a product first. Sponsy was intended to be a decentralized sponsorship platform, but the proprietor also openly says that the decentralized aspect isn’t critical. [3]
Ivan Komar, the founder of the Sponsy said:
"We hired a lawyer and that was a big mistake for us. Because our lawyer basically told us that we should not launch any ICO before we built a real product that might have some users. And I asked him why, because I saw so many ICOs out there who did not have any idea for any product, yet they managed to raise tens of millions of dollars." [4]
Courtesy of a bounty campaign from BountyHub.io [5], 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. [6]
[1.]
https://archive.fo/Llvzu - Archived Ebay listing
[2].
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sponsy-Blockchain-Project-For-Sale-mobile-app-web-app-MVP-developed/264246407460[3.]
https://www.ccn.com/this-eastern-european-guy-is-selling-his-failed-ico-on-ebay[4.]
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/03/25/1553498702000/A-failed-ICO-is-trying-to-flog-itself-on-eBay-/[5.]
https://sponsy.bountyhub.io/ - Bounty campaign run by BountyHub.io that generated it's bot-like "solid social presence"
[6.]
https://cointelegraph.com/news/owner-of-ico-that-never-happened-attempts-to-sell-project-on-ebay-for-60-000