Monsters Attack. How Big Money Is Infiltrating the Cryptoworld

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With the way that business sharks are expanding, it’s going to be harder and harder for young startups to make a name for themselves.

Decentralisation, like Sam Colt, has made men equal. Now you don’t have to beg business angels, your parents or gangsters for investment to start something cool. The garages of Steve Jobs and the Davidson brothers have been replaced by coworking spaces and thinking individuals were given the opportunity to accelerate the scientific and technical revolution.

Undoubtedly, most startups are still overflowing with lazy romantics and greedy crooks. But sites like ours and an improvement in the knowledge of crypto investors are helping to overcome this obstacle.

A hidden threat for fresh projects is powerful corporations who want to take advantage of the hype around blockchain to improve their own financial affairs. I’m sure that if General Motors didn’t go bankrupt, it would be holding an ICO too. Why the hell not? It has a high-profile name, brand recognition and droves of loyal customers. But fortunately, the auto giant is polishing the brass on the Titanic. Others that aren’t at that stage yet are entering the market with tempting offers.

Monster

Monster Inc. is an American company with 40 years of history. Its main product is audio and video cables. But they also produce speakers, headphones (heard of Beats by Dre?) and a load of other stuff – around 6,000 products in total. In recent years, things haven’t been going great for the concern. Consumers are increasingly moving to cheaper alternatives that are not inferior to Monster in quality. The collaboration with Dr. Dre is over too. That’s why the firm ended last year with a loss of almost $30 million.

It started optimising operations in the spring and withdrew its most unpopular product lines. Then the other day it was revealed that Monster intends to hold an ICO with a goal of $300 million. Here’s the application to the SEC. The company plans to create the Monster Money Network, an innovative online store based on blockchain. They want to sell more than just their own products and compete with giants such as Amazon, Ebay and Alibaba.

The company recently made a sudden decision to poke its nose into the gambling world. This, alongside the blockchain idea, confirms that things really are bad. They’re trying to dig themselves out of this hole by experimenting in hyped-up industries.

TON is one of the biggest mysteries in the history of the cryptocurrency world. Pavel Durov created the massive social network Vkontakte, which relegated Facebook to the background in Eastern Europe, made a decent amount of money from it and then successfully sold it. Subsequently, he made a slick messenger app that has already hooked 200 million users. Everything is sort of allowed there and it’s sort of encrypted against surveillance from the security services. Sweet story, isn’t it?

There’s just one problem – in the five years of its existence, the app hasn’t brought its creator a single penny. It’s unclear how it could be monetised while adamantly refusing any advertising. You know what came next. The ban in Iran and Russia. The crazy reach of the ICO announcement, the closed sales, the fake whitepapers, the fraudulent tokens, the theories that Durov is working with the FSB, the court cases involving former Telegram developers and the plagiarism lawsuits.

So far, there’s only one thing we don’t know: how exactly TON can fundamentally help not only the crypto community, but also humanity as a whole. Although its hype and loyal audience are surely worth a few billion dollars.

BitTorrent

On 22 September 2004, Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin founded the company BitTorrent.Inc. BitTorrent itself came onto the scene, as well as µTorrent and other useful platforms and services. As a result, users around the globe were able to download files from other people’s computers. This was one of the things that kickstarted the era of digital piracy. Modern-day Jack Sparrows and Long John Silvers sipped rum while sharing their porn collections, Half Life 2 mods and the latest Radiohead albums with the rest of the world.

The company grew, developed and was rated as one of the hottest on the West Coast. The number of people using its services reached 100 million. So the news that Justin Sun, the founder of TRON who has strong links to Alibaba, is buying it came like a bolt from the blue.

Why would he do such a thing? Well, here’s one possible scenario:

They need something to put behind their optimistic plans that the new TRON mainnet Odyssey 2.0 will quickly make everyone forget about Ethereum.

These cases are all different and they have different endgames. But they show that big money has already arrived in the cosy, anarchic world of crypto. It goes without saying that the heavyweights can afford the best developers, advertising on major news sites and an army of community managers. So if anyone’s just paid for their coworking desk and is starting to write a whitepaper and build an MVP, they should understand that the days when the poor could get hype are gone. Now, only real revolutionaries and the richest players will be noticed. Make a good product. The rest will come along with it.

But if you really want to help reveal scams and have blockchain move in the right direction, send us info and share your leaks and findings. We’ll post everything and smash the scammers into moon dust.

In blockchain we trust!

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