Hong Kong initial coin offering case studies: 300 Cubits and Gatcoin
300 Cubits: A token for the shipping industry
“The challenge we have is a chicken and egg one,” said Johnson Leung, co-founder of 300 Cubits, a company in the midst of launching an ICO in Hong Kong, and hoping to revolutionise the container shipping industry.
“We need to show the shipping industry that investors think our new token, which we are calling a TEU token, has value, or they won’t take it seriously, and we need the shipping industry to use our token to show investors that it is worth investing in.”
Leung and his co-founders, who have a background in shipping and finance, are hoping to use a digital token to solve a common problem in the shipping industry. That is, container liners cannot guarantee that their customers will turn up and so overbook, meaning that on occasions customers turn up only to find that the container vessel is full. Contracts are not adhered to, and banks are unwilling to hold deposits for either party.
“Our solution is to have a smart contract using blockchain technology, which is coded with a set of immutable conditions. Once committed, neither party can alter what has been agreed,” said Leung. Both parties pay an agreed amount of TEU tokens proportional to the value of the cargo in advance, and should either side fail to meet the conditions, they lose their tokens.
300 Cubits conducted a pre-ITS from August 16 to September 20 when it sold 2 per cent of its tokens. A full ITS is planned for later this year, which will distribute 38 per cent of the tokens. The bulk of the rest will be distributed to participants in the shipping industry and its customers.
“The plan for the next few months is to talk to the major shipping lines, use the relationships I built up when I worked in the industry, get some of them on board, then we will be well placed for the full ITS,” Leung said.