Navigating the Minefield of Token Offerings — Part 1
19 Apr 2019
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tech
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#security
#privacy
#blocktopus
Token offerings have enabled companies to crowdfund their operations by issuing freshly minted tokens to users that are willing to trade them for profit or to get a cheap early access ticket to the upcoming services of the token issuer. This process despite its benefits, has also suffered from a series of incidents that have damaged the trust between the token issuers and the potential buyers.
According to a 2018 study from Satis Group, approximately a 81% of the Token Offerings had been identified as Scams. ~6% of them Failed, ~5% had Gone Dead and ~8% of them ended up being traded on a exchange. Adding up the numbers, in 92% of the cases the users lost their funds, since they didn’t manage to trade the tokens on a exchange or to get the token issuer’s service in a discount.
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Panos Sakkos is an engineering leader at Databricks with 15 years of experience across research, cybersecurity, and engineering leadership. He has worked on security research at CERN and security engineering for Microsoft Office 365, and founded Blocktopus, a KYC/AML startup. He holds patents, has published research in security and machine learning, and has helped startups scale from pre-seed through Series B. On his blog, he writes about security leadership and developer productivity.