At the same time, ICO has many innovative applications in Japan, but at present, the most influential and popular part in Japanese society belongs to the "celebrity economy". The "celebrities" here not only refer to the new generation phenomena such as YouTuber and online celebrities, but also include star athletes, company managers or professional consultants and teachers. What the hell is going on here? How on earth did the Japanese connect to ICO? What are the risks? Please see this article for a detailed explanation.
VALU: When the prototype mentioned the connection between celebrity economy and ICO for the first time, it had to mention its originator VALU first (although it was only half a year). At the end of May this year, VALU, an online celebrity stock exchange, was launched with the slogan "Let anyone share and trade personal value like a company", allowing users to issue their own online stock "VA" on the platform. VA tickets are just like real stocks. The issuer can set the initial public sale price for other users to subscribe. These subscribers can not only buy and sell VA tickets freely, but also have the rights of "shareholders". For example, online celebrities and Coser can send signed photos, blogs can provide limited reading articles ... and so on.
What is the difference between that and ICO? The answer is 99% and 1%. The military transfer ticket is also written by the blockchain, and its value is completely linked to the popularity of online celebrities themselves. Red ones cost a lot of money to buy bitcoin, and no one pays attention to those that are not red. The difference between 65438 and 0% is that the VA ticket is not called a coin, which makes it impossible to associate it with the "first token issue" for the first time. The mechanism of VALU platform itself is also very perfect, from stock price, fluctuation chart, total market price, VA votes, closing price, initial listing value, highest price, etc ... just like a real stock exchange.
▲VALU platform itself has a perfect mechanism, from stock price, fluctuation chart, total market price, etc ... just like a real stock exchange. Yes, speaking of which, many readers should be able to understand the relationship between celebrity economy and ICO. Simply put, it is to directly "securitize" the celebrity's fame or career to the Internet; What are the advantages of doing so? First, for these celebrities, if they want to offer online courses or serve as film funds, the speed of raising the first bucket of gold is much faster than that of traditional people (don't forget that cryptocurrency is quite popular in Japan); The second is that for these sponsors, participating in ICO can not only sponsor celebrities, but also their tokens are rare (designed according to different mechanisms), and their prices may rise, which is of investment value.
Even "Shang Yan" is a typical burning. Since we talk about VALU, we have to mention the Hikaru incident that caused an uproar in Japanese society. YouTube Hikaru, which is very popular in Japan, once bought 14 ps4, horse racing144,000 yen for one-time exposure of lottery lines and other YouTube films. In June this year, Hikaru also joined the VALU platform, but at the same time, he and friendly YouTuber, such as La 'er and Forbidden Boy, began to promote VALU and VA tickets to fans in the community.
This made Hikaru's share price rise, but on August 15, when his share price was as high as 20,000 yen, Hikaru suddenly emptied his 5 1000 and sold it in one breath, earning about 50 million yen, and then deleted all the news of promoting VALU and VA votes in the community. What about the fans who bought his VA tickets? Of course, just like the real stock market, all the VA tickets in hand have become jiaozi shares.
▲ Hikaru's apology picture. Photo Acknowledgement: Hikaru's channel has just joined Hikaru's "Into Thin Air" (I don't know if it didn't run successfully or if it was stupid enough to think it wouldn't happen). Three days after the incident, Hikaru apologized in the community, and these profits bought back his veteran ticket, and Valu also frozen Hikaru. However, since then, Hikaru's momentum has plummeted, and Japanese netizens often call him a "fraudster".
But in fact, the Hikaru incident is a classic case with the highest incidence and the most frightening since the ICO came out: token issuers (that is, investors) cleared their tokens out of the market to earn cash in one breath, and then disappeared without a trace, leaving investors with nothing; In the United States, another case involving a similar pattern of fraud, but more intense and famous, is PlexCorps；; PlexCorps claims to have a world-class professional team, and its ICO release will be used to develop "powerful" software, and ensure investors to get a return of 1.354% within 29 days, and finally successfully win $65,438+$0.50 million.
Hikaru didn't douse the celebrity ICO. What happened to Hikaru? According to reports, the Japanese Financial Agency believes that the VA ticket is not within the jurisdiction of Japanese financial law and cannot sue Hikaru; For fraud; Shimonoseki once announced that he would stop YouTube activities, and the number of followers dropped from the peak of 2.6 million to about 2.3 million. But a month ago, he resumed his activities and continued to show movies, and the number of views was still very high.
▲ Timebank, which wants ICO online courses, is not only that, but celebrity ICO is getting worse in Japanese society, and another professional teaching website "Timebank" just wants ICO online courses. Timebank is one of the services of Metaps, and it is also well-known in Taiwan Province Province. It's similar to a good school in Taiwan Province Province, but not quite the same. It is a platform for inviting professional managers, professionals, even scholars and artists to "pay by the second and give one-on-one real-time lectures" online. But what's more interesting is that it connects the charging model with ICO, and the cost per second of each teacher will fluctuate according to popularity like the stock price. Timebank, on the other hand, found another ICO platform "COMSA" to issue cryptocurrency.
Thanks to VALU, ICO〖token stars〗], a tennis player from Russia, is very popular in Japan although he is not a local. The operation mode of TokenStars is similar to VALU, except that online celebrities are replaced by tennis players, and VA tickets become "ACE coins"; They claim that after tennis players, they will continue to March into sports players such as football, bridge, basketball and hockey, and even film actors, artists and models are possible.
However, since the Hikaru incident, the FSA has not been idle. 10 year127 October issued a statement saying that ICO formally belongs to the management category of Japan's Payment Services Law or Financial Instruments and Trading Law, which has drawn several clear legal boundaries for the seemingly overheated Japanese ICO market.
Taiwan Province Province on the Move? What about Taiwan Province Province, which is close to Japan? Of course, the Wotian Coffee Coin ICO launched by INSIDE a few days ago is an example (this case model is close to e-commerce, not equity issuance). However, compared with the Japanese celebrity ICO economy, two large-scale live broadcast platforms 17 and UP in Taiwan Province Province of China also announced their entry into the field of encrypted tokens; 17 The current model is relatively simple, that is, you can buy reward points directly with Bitcoin/Ethereum.
However, the "GiFTO" issued by UP is very noteworthy. According to UP official, GiFTO was only purchased as a reward. Some people may think that this sounds no different from what 17 is doing. Yes, they all look the same so far. Whether 17 or above supports the purchase of points of Bitcoin/Ethereum, the main purpose is to be optimistic about the future upward trend of Bitcoin or Ethereum, and now collect more Bitcoin/Ethereum to look forward to its future rising profits.
▲ UP issues a virtual token "GiFTO" full of layout space. Photo Acknowledgement: Uplive However, there is another advantage of issuing GiFTO's own virtual currency, that is, it can also be an ICO platform with online celebrity equity like "VALU" in the future. If the operation is really successful and the performance is booming, with the cooperation of GiFTO ***, UP can also enjoy the additional benefits brought by the price increase of GiFTO currency; Nishimiya sold a lot of coins in exchange for cash, which is only a third-rate practice. UP can once and for all release a small amount of GiFTO coins as long-term cash flow, even more ambitious, and become one of the common currencies of the Asian network celebrity economy.
So, maybe next year, even YouTube-based internet celebrities will have a chance to popularize ICO in Taiwan Province Province.