KodakCoin ICO launch delayed “several weeks” to verify investors
The first time the coin was offered it failed due to a lack of interest. Now it may be oversubscribed.
The KodakCoin ICO attracted a lot of interest following its initial announcement. Intrigued investors got involved and the Kodak share price multiplied overnight.
At the time it was announced that the ICO would be open to accredited investors only, for a launch on 31 January. But today Kodak announced that it would be delayed for "several weeks" while it verified its buyers.
"Given the large interest in the KODAKCoin ICO and the steps we need to take to verify the 'accredited investor' status of each interested investor, we expect this process to take several weeks," says a statement from Kodak.
This suggests that Kodak might have been caught off guard by the flashbulb popularity of its ICO, and the surge of interest following the initial announcement.
They aren’t the only capital-seeker to struggle with this issue of verification, and it might be unsurprising that in the age of ICOs, at least one organisation has taken the meta turn of seeking funding to find a blockchain-based solution to this problem.
It’s also been struggling with fake Kodak ads cropping up in the wake of its announcement, in which scammers offer platforms to sell fake Kodak coins. Although there might be little Kodak can do about this other than clarify that the coins are only available for sale on the official Kodak site.
But not everyone is enthusiastic about the project, and if it doesn’t go well then real Kodak coins might be worth about as much as fake ones.
According to Bloomberg news, about a third of Kodak’s shares are traded as a short position, suggesting that a sizable portion of traders don’t have a lot of faith in the venture, although the majority of Kodak futures traders might still favour Kodak's fortunes.
Meanwhile, The Times reports that Cameron Chell, a lead consultant of the Kodak project was previously banned from the Alberta Stock Exchange and charged with fraud, and described Kodak’s technical whitepaper as "a 40 page mishmash of marketing buzzwords and vague diagrams."
Despite that, the delay suggests that there’s still more demand than many expected.
But does this demand come from the actual merits of the coin, or is it simply a nostalgic response to the Kodak brand name?
Probably the second one. The exact same coin was previously offered without the Kodak brand name, but its ICO flopped and was withdrawn due to a lack of interest. Now it seems to be having the opposite problem.
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