Sponsy, an ICO that failed to get off the ground during the 2017 boom, is up for sale on eBay for a mere $60,000. The project, the brainchild of New Yorker Ivan Komar, was intended to be a decentralized sponsorship platform, but he delayed the token sale on legal advice and was left holding the baby when the crypto bubble popped in 2018. And, now he wants someone else to take the lead weight opportunity off his hands.
Missing the Train
The Sponsy ICO was all set to go live in 2017 at a time when blockchain projects couldn’t fail to raise capital, but after receiving legal advice Komar decided to put it on hold, as he explained to the Financial Times:
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.
Indeed they were, risking prison time by doing so, and Komar watched as the ICO bubble grew and burst while he tried to develop his product in accordance with his lawyer’s advice, admitting now that he would have “tried to run a token sale as soon as possible… and raise as much money as possible before building any product.” Fair enough, as he certainly wouldn’t have been alone.
Komar built his product while the ICO bubble grew and burst, finally having something ready to sell by mid-2018. By this time however the ICO market was as buoyant as a gravel-filled blimp, and Komar couldn’t raise any interest let alone capital. Nine months later, some two years after he first began working on Sponsy, he is hoping to attract an “enterprise client” who will buy the platform off him in its current state.
What You Get for Your Money
According to the ad, all Sponsy needs to function is a “typical, centralised server”, which doesn’t get us off to a great start in terms of decentralization. What you get for your $60,000 is a “fully functional cross-platform application” for collection of ICO/STO funds, which is described as containing “industry-leading software”. Other highlights include “thousands of lines of code” and around 180 pages of documentation, all of which has been audited by “an investment firm” (not an auditor?) and has been “designed and approved by investment bankers”. Which ones exactly? Komar tells us:
This couldn’t be called a fully fledged investment banking audit, it’s just some firm that was considering investing in crypto.
With these salesmanship skills it’s doubtful that even in the silly season that was mid-2017 Sponsy could have raised enough capital to get the project off the ground. Eighteen months later Komar has even less of a chance of selling his pet project, but that hasn’t stopped him trying. Should you be interested in picking up Sponsy you’ll have to be quick – the auction ends Friday.
