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Celebrity ICO Endorsers Face Legal Blowback Over Alleged Fraud

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Celebrity ICO Endorsers Face Legal Blowback Over Alleged Fraud
Celebrity ico endorsers face legal blowback over alleged fraud

Boxing superstar Floyd Mayweather and rap producer DJ Khaled face a legal battle for serving as celebrity endorsers to an initial coin offering (ICO) accused of fraud. The founders of the allegedly fraudulent ICO were arrested by American criminal authorities back in April.

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ICO Promotion Blowback

Celebrity ico endorsers face legal blowback over alleged fraudCelebrity gossip tabloid TMZ reports that Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled have been slapped with a lawsuit from investors who accuse them of participating in a multi-million dollar scam. The lawsuit revolves around the Centra Tech ICO that raised more than $32 million from thousands of investors last year, supposedly to build a suite of financial products including a cryptocurrency-backed debit card supported by Visa and Mastercard.

According to the class action lawsuit, Floyd and Khaled were influential in promoting the virtual currency on social media. The investors are targeting the celebrity endorsers, in addition to the company’s founders, with the aim of recouping their lost money plus damages. They complain that the value of the token crashed by over 98%, from about $1 per CTR in February to bellow $0.02 per token in April.

Founders Arrested

Celebrity ico endorsers face legal blowback over alleged fraudIn early April we reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged two co-founders of Centra Tech with orchestrating a fraud and criminal authorities arrested them both. Robert Farkas and Sohrah Sharma are alleged to have “masterminded a fraudulent ICO in which Centra offered and sold unregistered investments through a CTR Token.” The two are accused of lying about the relationships with Visa and Mastercard, creating fake biographies, and publishing false or misleading marketing materials to Centra’s website.

Later in April, the SEC charged a third co-founder, Raymond Trapani, with violating the anti-fraud and registration provisions of U.S. federal securities laws. The SEC released text messages between Farkas, Trapani and Sharma showing that, in response to a cease-and-desist letter from a bank demanding that Centra remove all references to it from their marketing materials, Sharma said “We gotta get that shit removed everywhere and blame freelancers lol.”

Should celebrity ICO endorsers be held to account for supporting these projects? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Here’s How SonoCoin Is Trying To Use Sound To Transfer Value

Companies are rushing to try and make peer to peer, blockchain based value transfer quicker and simpler right now and this company thinks it’s been able to do just that.


bitcoin just broke through a major resistance level and interest in the space has never been higher. Companies of all shapes and sizes are popping up, looking to take advantage of the rush to develop and establish the blockchain-centric infrastructure that’s going to serve as the foundation for technological advance for many years to come and many of these are conducting ICOs to try and pick up funding. The ICO space, however, and likely as a direct result of the above statement, is pretty crowded right now and a company that wants to stand out and – in turn – to attract investor capital through an initial offering has to serve up something unique. Reports have just hit press that a company called SonoCoin is about to launch its efforts to do just that and, at a glance, the company looks as though it certainly checks the ‘unique offering’ box.

SonoCoin has developed a blockchain based peer-to-peer value transfer system that uses a digitally encrypted audio file as its transfer token. In contrast to bitcoin, which uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocol, SonoCoin uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol to verify transactions and, again unlike bitcoin, the exchange token can be sent via any means through which a standard data/audio file can be sent – email, messenger application, etc.

So how does it work?

The company has developed an algorithm that takes a transaction hash, a secret key and the index (which is defined as the number of outputs when the coin was formed) and converts it into a .wav file.

This file can then be sent from one device to another (basically, so long as the devices have a microphone and a speaker that can emit, recognize and interpret sound, which pretty much all mobile devices do right now) and, on receipt, an application (which is already available for some devices) specifically designed to interpret these SonoCoin sound files will record and register the transaction.

And why is this news now?

The company is currently conducting a presale of its tokens and intends to move into the second phase of this presale on December 14, at the end of next week. During phase one and phase two (phase one has been active since this time last week), a total of 30 million coins will be issued. Subsequent to the presale, 40 million coins will be issued as part of the full ICO.

How successful the ICO will be remains to be seen but the assumption is that, post-completion, SonoCoin will look to pick up a listing for its coins on the major exchanges in the space – Bittrex, Poloniex, etc. and it’s at that point that we’ll really get an idea of the market appetite for this sort of alternative-format type value transfer.

Here’s the company’s Whitepaper for anyone looking to get a better idea of how SonoCoin works.

What do you think of this sort of application of blockchain technology? Will the ability to transfer value via sound files aid mainstream adoption of algorithm-based peer-to-peer transactions? Let us know in the comments section below!


Image courtesy of Tess Watson via Flickr

The post Here’s How SonoCoin Is Trying To Use Sound To Transfer Value appeared first on Bitcoinist.com.