It’s not easy to make your initial coin offering, or ICO, stand out from the thousands of fundraising efforts riding the cryptocurrency trend.
CashBet, a California-based digital gambling site, thinks they’ve found a way to cut through the noise, however.
The five-year-old company has secured a deal with British soccer club Arsenal FC to promote its ICO at the team’s 60,000-seat stadium in London, as reported by The Guardian.
CashBet Coin, which will be built on the Ethereum blockchain, will solve the "payout delay problem," its website says. Other casinos take up to four days to process a winner's payments, CashBet claims, and the gaming company says its cryptocurrency can pay players instantly.
"CashBet Coins (CBC) will democratize access to world-class entertainment for those underserved by the centralized banking establishment,” CashBet CEO Mike Reaves said. “CBC will be the currency of choice on CashBet-powered casinos, which are used by operators to pay licensing and content fees, and wagered by players on great games."
In other words, CashBet Coin is intended to function much like chips at a traditional casino. Once a player has exchanged legal tender for a casino’s chips, the plastic disks can be used to wager on games.
CashBet says it wants to raise between $40 and $70 million from the sale, with a hard limit of 430 million tokens, initially priced at $0.50 each. It’s not clear which blockchain or cryptocurrency exchanges will support the CashBet Coin.
"We are pleased to welcome CashBet Coin as our partner,” Arsenal’s chief commercial officer, Vinai Venkatesham, said in a press release. “We are looking forward to working with CashBet Coin as they launch their new cryptocurrency."
Despite warnings from US regulators and outright bans in other countries, the ICO craze has continued to explode. As of October 2017, ICOs had raised $2.7 billion in funds for companies and organizations — easily outpacing traditional venture capital fundraising.
Consulting firm Ernst & Young estimates that about $400 million was stolen in ICO scams and attacks last year. Arsenal did not disclose the value of its deal with CashBet.
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