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According to a new report, South Korea is contemplating reversing a ban on Initial Coin Offering in the coming months. The Korean time’s reports of a plan by the authorities to allow ICO and digital token based fundraising and make it possible for domestic investors to make advancements in Blockchain based technologies
The media company, which is one of South Korea’s most popular newspaper accounts of an ongoing discussion, between South Korea’s tax agency, the justice ministry and other concerned government offices, acknowledges possible talks on plans and conditions for a possible revitalization of ICOs in the country.
September’s Decision
If the discussions bear fruit and everything goes as planned, the country could witness a major reversal of the ban announced last September.
Financial regulators had previously banned raising money via any form of virtual currency including initial coin offerings and recommended regulation over the same. The decision in September by the South Korean authorities was attributed to the fact that there existed risks and possibilities of financial scamming. The announcement by China in the previous weeks may also have influenced South Korea’s decision.
Even after announcing the ban, the administration was reluctant to implement the ICO rule and was yet to impose any company into returning ICO funds. But this did not stop the migration of local blockchain startups into crypto-friendly countries and environments like Estonia and Switzerland. However, South Korean citizens remained free to invest in foreign ICOs.
According to Kang Young Soo, an official overseeing Cryptocurrency trading policies, the decision was yet to be made on whether to reverse the decision made in September or not. He, however, acknowledges that they were considering a third party view on the same. Mr. Kang had admitted in a recent industry forum, of plans to advance the blockchain technologies while regulating crypto trading.
Other sources familiar to the country’s tax code confirmed the rumors and expect a U-turn of September’s decision soon as the nation resolved and fixed the legal groundwork regarding crypto trading.
What To Expect?
Well, various sources have given a hint on what to expect. One, the source advised ICO-enthusiasts to expect an imposition of capital gains tax, VAT or both. The source also admits of a possibility of levying corporate tax from crypto exchanges and regulation by issuing of licenses. He, however, acknowledges that the matter was still in discussion and various agencies, including banks and tax agencies, were being brought to the table for transparency. In any case, the government cannot implement the policy on its own without tracking capital inflows into ICO.
ICOs make sense for startups because of their little paperwork and the fact that they let companies solicit money directly from the investors. The ban that didn’t limit trade oversees still worked for the startups, as they were able to raise funds overseas.
Even as the ban was implemented, investors with interest in ICOs grew significantly. This forced the government to rethink its decision. The proposed policy changes are a great deal for investors when it comes to transparency.
Cryptocurrency Markets Bearish
On Thursday Morning, the Cryptocurrency markets plunged to new lows, or below $8000, in a delayed reaction to negative publicity from Google. This publicity is raising skepticism in the already volatile markets where investors have been experiencing short-term shocks since 2013 when China started discouraging her nationals from participating in the trade.
The market leader Bitcoin’s lost 13.25% of its value in the wake of the ban; this loss has cumulatively seen Bitcoin shed off a mind-boggling approximate of 43% of share value from January 2018. According to market data, the Bitcoin Market was trading at $14,111.98 as the year began. On the other hand, Ethereum and Ripple currencies’ values are down by 14.54% and 16.58% to trade at %593.6 and $0.66 respectively. Summarily, according to Coin Market Cap report, all but two Cryptocurrencies’ stocks are trading in lows ranging between 11% to 26%.
Google Follows Facebook Move And Bans Gambling Advertisements
Google, a US-based global leading search engine, and advertisement firm issued a statement in March 2018, prohibiting “bad advertisements” effective from June 2018 on the AdWords platform. Google’s, in a document released to the media, stated that Cryptocurrencies’ information which includes; Cryptocurrency exchanges, Cryptocurrency trade reviews, Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and crypto wallets are “bad” advertisements as they are speculative and largely lack policy regulations. Google further stated that cryptocurrencies are emerging threats to Google services users and they have a “moral and ethical obligation” to protect Google users from “deceptive and misleading promotions.”
Google has followed in the footsteps of the arch-business rival, Facebook. Similarly, Facebook had, in January this year, banned all Cryptocurrency advertisements in a move that was geared to restore Facebook to its intended purpose of enhancing social relationships in the world; these social relationships had systematically being replaced by advertisements, which were unwarranted.
Financial Analysts Forecasts
Market analysts are sharply divided on the impact of the negative publicity from Google and Facebook. On one side, the market analysts state that Facebook, which is a vital advertising platform in the world, with almost similar market influence to Google, initiated the ban and the markets only experienced short-term bearish trends before reverting to bullish growth. Following this analogy, these market analysts predict that Cryptocurrency markets will regain their bullish patterns that will see more ICO traded in the coming months. However, they cannot predict when the markets will recover. Will it be a matter of days, weeks, months or years? Amongst them, it is suspected that some investors are propagating these sentiments to lower the value of the significant cryptocurrencies in anticipation of massive ICO buyouts.
On the other hand, some market analysts allude that this recent negative publicity is one too many and the Cryptocurrency markets will never recover. Their perspective premised on Google’s prominent social standing globally. It is widely believed that Google has nailed the last nail and investors will be rushing to sell off their shares anticipating further losses.
Omnitude Initial Coin Offering and its ECOM token link the current eCommerce platforms and enterprise systems to the Blockchain technologies. One of the pressing demands in the technology space is the interoperability that exists between the Blockchain technology and the networks of disparate software systems. A number of software solutions operate in disparate information verticals.
eCommerce websites and other enterprises can easily apply the use of Omnitude without changing the existing system to create a data ecosystem that is more transparent and efficient. As an open-source project, Omnitude has solid solutions that can also be used by a myriad of application developers.
The Value Proposition of Omnitude
Omnitude has been designed around standard APIs and a series of connectors that assists in shuttling data between various Blockchains and software platforms.
It gives the users an opportunity to develop data flows and integrations as a script or just an application.
The eCommerce industry is the main target market for Omnitude even though the use cases of ERP are in limitless in theory.
Omnitude has been created to help in the eradication of the several issues that are faced in the world of eCommerce. These include supply chain inefficiencies, customer onboarding by individual traders, and both seller and buyer fraud.
Omnitude had created three mechanisms that will assist the traders to lower identity theft, and these are the Omnitude Proof-of-Interaction, Single Reputation, and the Omnitude’s Single Identity. Omnitude has plans of launching the ECOM token on its upcoming Omnilayer platform.
Functions of the ECOM Token
The ECOM Token {ERC20} is basically a method of settlement that various parties can apply to access an ecosystem resource. Here are the main functions of the token.
ECOM gives the traders an opportunity to make payments in the ecosystem and subsequently access features such as:
• Omnitude ID
• Delivery Cycle Data
• Shared Product Data and a host of other needs.
It also makes it easy to make payments using Cryptocurrencies, FIAT, or the ECOM token. They can also be rewarded by other ECOM tokens when they take part in loyalty programs and other reviews.
Omnitude works as an incentive for merchants in this space to operate and secure the ecosystem. Its Blockchain has been fully secured by a peer-to-peer, and distributed network of validating nodes that manage the client application of the Omnibus Core. The nodes that will be able to apply the consensus algorithm will be able to get a share of the ECOM block.
The Team
The current CEO of Omnitude is its founder, Chris Painter. Before joining Omnitude, Mr Painter had earlier spent nine years as the managing director for Pixel by Pixel. The senior advisor is one of its co-founders, Robert Belgrave, who also founded Wirehive, a cloud services company.
The Department of Operations is headed by Ben Bennet who has worked in six various firms as the Sales Director.
The Final Verdict
The Omnitude ICO comes with a creative approach that tends to address some of the major problems faced in the world of enterprise system management. It brings some of the most innovative implementations that are needed in this industry.
Over the years, the technology of facial recognition has continued to be applied in several cases. From the collection of consumer data to identification and security, this technology is estimated to hit an industry valuation $7.76 billion by 2022.
The main aim of the Kairos ICO is to introduce their special facial identification methodology onto the Blockchain technology.
The Value Proposition of Kairos ICO
Basically, Kairos is a tech firm that has interest in facial recognition and artificial intelligence. The Initial Coin Offering conducted by Kairos is an opportunity where customers can buy both utility and security tokens for the onchain version of the platform that they currently use for facial recognition.
The system applies machine learning and computer vision to recognize faces in photos, videos, and even the real world. The Kairos utility token is in a very broad scope due to the fact that the architecture is designed to carry out three main duties.
• The first one is identity, which basically helps in searching and also verifying the faces.
• The other facet that this function is built off of is emotions. This is used for the purposes of measuring mood and sentiment.
• The last facet is demographics, which is used to collect demographic data concerning gender, age, as well as ethnicity.
All these three facets are widely referred to as the human analytics. As such, they can either be used at personal levels or in a group to gather information regarding certain persons as they go on with their day-to-day activities.
Apart from helping businesses by gathering for them certain data regarding the kind of customers that visit their stores, Kairos also assists in gathering important information on how the clients react and feel while responding to stimuli. As a matter of fact, Kairos is the only facial recognition service provider in this vast industry.
The Kairos also has a tokenized architecture that is based on two facets.
• The first one is the Kairos Security token {KAIROS}, which offers a great stake in the industry.
• The second one is the Kairos identity token, or utility {FACE}, which assists in gas to powering the main platform.
The holders of the security token will be awarded with one utility token, and this will cause their liquidity to come from the utility token.
The Strengths & Opportunities of Kairos
Kairos is one company that has shown a solid track record for the past six years they have been in service. They had an opportunity of working with IMRSV, an emotion analysis firm, which gave them a technology they included in their product. This is what brought in the branded human analytics item. Its ability to analyze an individual’s ethnic makeup makes it one of the best companies.
The Team
For the six years, Kairos has been operating; Brian Brackeen has been its Chief Executive Officer Brian is the one who founded the company after leaving Apple, where he worked as a Senior Project Manager.
The company’s CTO is Cole Calistra, while the company’s CDO is Ben Virdee-Chapman. Professional guidance to the members of this company is offered by Herwig Konings, who is the founder and the CEO of Invent Ready.