Mine too. I love the slick production values. Someone put money into this project. The promise is grand:
Perfect Interbank allows you to always get the best exchange rate from cryptocurrencies to global fiat, allowing you
Forty Euros!? Think of all that savings! Monaco also provides you with a card that has a Visa logo, and an app that acts like a wallet on your phone. The two together let you use Ethereum to do everything a debit card can do. All of that sounds great, until you realize that Monaco is selling tokens.
Why does a debit card need its own token? The ad makes a dubious claim:
Monaco wants to share its 'future success' with its supporters? Call me skeptical. As an added incentive, when the sale ends on 17th June 2017, the first 500 investors and the 500 largest investors will be awarded a limited edition black card that entitles the bearer to use Monaco's service at a reduced cost.
Sounds valuable, but why the tokens? I headed to the forums at bitcointalk.org to see what was up. The results did not disappoint:
To which the forum replied:
Oh snap! But in Monaco's defense, they didn't know the community would think their efforts were a scam. You can trust them. One of their team members totally used to work at Mastercard.
Others on the forum had the same question as me:
Why does Monaco need a token? Kris, the founder, did not reply to any of these questions. This was confusing. He answered almost every other question, and this was the only one that had been asked multiple times. I Googled again and wound up on hacked.com where I found a breakdown of the earmarks for the funds that would be raised during Monaco's ICO:
And suddenly, it all made sense. There will be no ledger. There will be no miners. The token is not a token, it is a fundraiser. The ether it represents will be used to pay the staff for research, marketing, acquisitions, and working capital. In exchange, the investors with the biggest stake will be given a special debit card so as to convert cryptocurrency into fiat with style. Seems fair, but remember:
