Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey recently participated in a $10 million raise from ICO platform CoinList.
In a statement to the Wall Street Journal on October 30, 2019, Dorsey stated that CoinList presents an honest solution for coin launches:
“Crypto needs a trustworthy platform for launching new projects. CoinList leads the industry in that role, and trading is a logical next step.”
The news comes at a testing time for fundraising in the cryptocurrency industry, which has been fledgling since the ICO crash of 2018.
Heavier regulatory controls globally – partially fueled by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission‘s reticence for the emerging ecosystem which has pushed regulators around the world to follow in their footsteps – and has helped create a ‘crypto winter’ over the past year and a half.
The SEC recently halted Russian company Telegram’s TON sale with an emergency restraining order. Telegram was started in 2013 by the brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, the creators of VK, the largest social network of Russia. Telegram is registered as both an English LLP and an American LLC.
The SEC stated in a document that Telegram failed to register a securities issuance and was “…committed to flooding the U.S. capital markets with billions of Grams by October 31, 2019”.
Unlike in some other SEC enforcement actions that targeted crypto startups, an action against American-led Block.one, who capitalized on the hype in cryptocurrencies when it sold 900 million tokens in 2017 and 2018, raking in billions of dollars, the SEC didn’t accuse the company of fraud. Instead, the deal only said Block.one failed to register the sale with the SEC and provide U.S. investors with required disclosures and slapped them on the wrist with a mere $24 million fine.
Major projects such as Algorand, TrustToken, Blockstack, Nervos and Filecoin have used Coinlist for their token sales in the past and the company states it has helped raise over $500 million through more than 50 token sales.
Dorsey has pledged his long-term commitment to Bitcoin. Earlier this year his company Square launched Square Crypto, earlier this year with a small team to help with bitcoin and cryptocurrency development.
