Mr Vikram Pandya, Director of FinTech at SP Jain School of Global Management, recently had his comments featured in The Sun Daily, Malaysia's first free and largest circulating urban newspaper. Titled Initial coin offerings – Are they worth a look?, the article also featured comments from industry leaders including Aaron Tang (Marketing/Community Lead, Luno Malaysia), and Evan Ngow (Chief Communication Officer, GCOX).
The article discusses how the flourishing initial coin offering (ICO) industry seems to have been cast in an unfavourable light in Malaysia, particularly after the ban on Singapore-based CopyCash’s issuance imposed by the Securities Commission, Malaysia (SC).
There are mixed feelings about ICOs; while some call it a scam, others believe that to lump all ICOs as scams is very unfortunate and is not fair, since there are good ICOs in the market. For those who want to invest in ICOs, they are advised to read their white papers first which will give them a basic understanding of what the ICOs are, the potential as well as the promise.
In the article, Mr Pandya opined that an ICO is an excellent mechanism to augment the capital through crowdsourcing for innovative projects, which directly challenges traditional model of venture capital and private equity funding. “It has allowed many projects to get funding without going to ‘silicon valleys’ of the world.”
However, he said there is a need for a proper regulatory framework for ICOs to prevent abuse of the system. “It is in essence similar to an IPO but with several peculiar nuances of its own. A dedicated framework for ICOs will ensure that fraudsters and scammers will not be able to abuse this system,” he shared.