The joy and the danger

Examples of SA ICOS are few and far between, even though the broader market is exploding

pany’s service, and have a vested interest in the start-up’s success”, he says.

Mitchell says ICO funding tends to come from “the cryptorich — the people who made a fortune off bitcoin and ethereum and are now looking to invest in these businesses partly because they want to diversify and partly because they believe in this space and want to seed the next generation of companies that are changing the world”.

Some local companies have already set up ICO investment arms. Sovtech, for instance, operates Caesium Capital, a blockchainbased digital asset manager that invests in ICOS. It is also in the process of launching a “fully tokenised” investment bank called Quadratico, says Neves.

ICOS “absolutely can take off” in SA, according to Mitchell. A growing number of blockchain-based businesses in the country are creating “ecosystems that require those tokens”.

The Sun Exchange is one of those. Like its peers, it uses its tokens to create incentives for certain behaviours. Cambridge says the company’s Sunex tokens — which are being sold during the ICO — provide incentives for investments in “priority projects”.

“As people buy solar cells on our platform, they will earn Sunex [tokens]. And it’s a bit like [Discovery’s] Vitality, where if you complete certain tasks you get bonus [tokens]. So if you buy a solar cell for a school, you will get a bonus allocation of [tokens], and if you put a solar cell in the northern hemisphere, you will attain the ‘endless summer achievement’ and get a bonus.

“The point of the ICO is that we’re preselling these [tokens] at a significant discount. It usually costs $10 to buy as and when we do solar projects, but in the ICO people can buy as many as they want for $1 each.”

Cambridge says The Sun Exchange’s ICO “has been a huge project — we want to get it done correctly because it’s a one-off chance of doing this kind of thing”.

In essence, investors either bet on cryptocurrency tokens becoming valuable, or they plan to use [them]. While other types of tokens exist, these “utility tokens” are the most popular at the moment, as they are not subject to securities regulations, says Jalal Ghiassi-razavi, blockchain and ICO lead at PWC SA.

However, Mitchell says launching an ICO is becoming a complex process, and is attracting greater regulatory scrutiny. Regulators in the US, for instance, have decided that most tokens sold during ICOS are securities. “And to sell securi-