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Shipchain Initial Coin Offering (ICO)

Interest in Shipchain's ICO cryptocurrency exploded in the past year.  Starting around December of 2017, almost every day another new promoter of the "Shipcoin" launched yet another article claiming that the Shipchain ICO was a revolutionary platform. In fact, this Forbes article, which was later taken down by the Forbes staff, claimed that Shipchain was a "handful of blockchain platforms poised to do things even the Internet couldn’t accomplish." Additionally major influencers like Shark Tank star Kevin Harrington helped promote Shipchain's ICO to investors.  What was Kevin Harrington's compensation for promoting Shipchain's ICO?   Was that compensation disclosed to the Shipchain ICO investors? In the past year other influencers such as Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled also promoted ICOs, only to get charged by the SEC: The Securities and Exchange Commission said they are the first cases to charge touting violations regarding ICOs, a relatively new phenomenon that has attracted billions of investor dollars to new cryptocurrencies, often with little to back them up. Mayweather didn't disclose a $100,000 promotional payment from Centra Tech Inc., while Khaled didn't disclose a $50,000 payment. The two men settled the charges without admitting or denying the findings. The SEC says its investigation is ongoing. The internet is filled with offers of new tokens with names that seem calculated to suggest solidity and reliability: Civic, Paragon, Blockchain Capital. Weighty Latin and Greek names like Veritaseum or Gnosis are also a popular way promoters aim to inspire confidence in a new token. But despite the broad range of colorful token names, the basic structure of initial coin offerings is often essentially the same.  A “White Paper” of some 15 to 20 pages lays out the projected purpose for the token, the technology behind it, the biographies of the promoters, and the sales goals the promoters have set for the token. The White Paper is posted on a flashy website, and the promoters open up a sale of the token to the public for a limited time period. In essence, an initial coin offering is nothing more than an offer of investment opportunity. The sale of crypto tokens is called an “initial coin offering” (ICO) because it so closely resembles an initial public offering of stock.