Clamp on coin offerings
THE Securities Commission (SC) has shut down an initial coin offering (ICO) in Malaysia and says it will not hesitate to rein in others who try to contravene securities laws.
ICOs are all the rage the world over now, where parties produce white papers detailing their business plans for raising funds via the issuance of new tokens or cryptocurrencies, all purportedly to be built on the blockchain technology.
In this case, Singapore-registered CopyCash Foundation had first indicated its intention to launch an ICO in Malaysia last week.
According to its white paper, CopyCash plans to establish a social trading and investment or “social travesting” platform, based on the Ethereum blockchain with CopyCashCoin (CCC) as a standard Ethereum ERC20 token used as either a subscription or commission token.
“CCC, CopyCash’s internal token, is used as a privilege to pay commissions for profits generated by copytrading,” it said.
CopyCash defines copytrading as an automated trade engine based on the signal trading feature, which enables users to receive real-time trading signals from top traders. Its ICO, which entails a public sale of 30 million CCC tokens, had planned to raise some US$127.2 mil lion(510.09 million ringgit).
This is based on the ICO rate of one Ether to 300 CCC and an Ether to (US dollar price of) US$1,272.03 (5,101.03 ringgit).
Last Friday, the SC issued a notice saying that there has been an increase in activities by new ICOs to solicit investments in cryptocurrencies from the public at large, including senior citizens, and that it is aware that CopyCash had organised talks and seminars in major cities in Malaysia. In addition, the regulator intends to call in key officers of CopyCash Foundation to enquire about its activities.
