It’s not often at FT Alphaville that we have to combine two of our favorite topics into one article to create an FTAV fusion, if you will.
There have been exceptions. There was that time, our Elon decided to tweet about Dogecoin. Or when the great curator Michael Green Grant Schapps decided to dip his toe in the blockchain. And who can forget when Neil Woodford invested in a cold fusion company that literally made claims that were scientifically impossible.
Still, perhaps the biggest FTAV merger is du crypto graphic crime flavor.
With cryptomania now being a phenomenon of yesteryear, we thought we had seen the end of this particular dish. After all, with enthusiasm for the space waning from the madness of 2017, there’s less reason to beat an ICO, or Bitcoin price target, via chart. Or so we thought.
How wrong we were.
INX Trading Solutions is a “fully regulated digital asset trading ecosystem for listing and trading cryptocurrencies and security tokens for institutional and retail investors”.
In just under a day, he launched an ICO with the aim of raising $109 million, net of commissions, from the sale of 130 million tokens. On his website, it claims to have the “world’s first F-1 prospectus for a fully registered security token IPO aimed at establishing a scalable financial trading market and becoming a premier trading and listing arena for digital assets of the blockchain”. This prospectus, which has been filed with the SEC, may be read here.
Yet for all INX talks about its “strong adherence to laws and regulations from the start”, that doesn’t seem to have extended to its graphic design department which, delightfully, brought this up in an attempt to demonstrate how a quantum leap forward in financial innovation, this token offering is (h/t to Joe Weisenthal for report on Twitter):
There’s almost too much to sort out here. Why are the blue circles sized this way? Where is the advent of insurance and central banking in the 17th century? Why are these tokens, which pay a fixed cash flow distribution, so different from other exotic forms of equity? And, most importantly, where, or what, is the Y axis?
We mean, we could go on. Or, as FT Alphaville is sure you do, we could just keep watching it in all its criminal glory. Enjoy.
