Sooner or later, there always appear services and programs that allow purchasing goods, whatever they are, at a discounted rate. The tokens purchasable within ICO procedures, are no exception. Roman Pertsovskiy, former top manager of EdusonTV corporate education interactive online courses, launched a service for a collective purchase of cryptotokens. The service called Tokenator has already arranged its first deals, with Playkey cloud gaming platform tokens put on sale on October 12. One can buy tokens having as little as $30 at hand, so in such a manner people with limited resources can join their capitals to be able to collectively get better terms at ICOs. Nevertheless, at its first presale Tokenator has been so far unable to grant even the minimum discount of 50% stated in its media release. The small discount is well offset by the bonus, though.
The scheme and the team
Tokenator follows the patterns of Groupon from the USA, which guarantees significant discounts for collective purchases. On a daily basis, Groupon webpage displays new deals with discounts reaching 80%. It is noteworthy that two former employees of Groupon’s Russian unit, its ex-CMO Irina Shashkina and its ex-PR manager Ksenia Chabanenko, now work for Tokenator. Ksenia Chabanenko and Evgeniy Potapov, Tokenator’s Technology Advisor, currently live in Silicon Valley making contacts with ICO teams whose tokens Tokenator could put on sale.
Besides, Roman Pertsovskiy has good contacts in the world of cryptocurrencies through his twin brother Maxim Pertsovskiy, Business Development Director at Waves Platform (asset/custom token issuance, transfer, and trading on blockchain and ICOs).
Tokenator founders promise to offer opportunities to purchase tokens with discounts reaching 50% or even 80%. According to Roman Pertsovskiy, tokens of ten more “well known and promising companies” will be offered at Tokenator in the near future with discounts up to 80%.
As a rule, big bonuses during ICOs may only be obtained subject to buying many tokens and paying much money. Hence, for most prospective investors the best terms are not available and they usually have to buy tokens at maximum price. Tokenator negotiates with blockchain projects a collective purchase of tokens and thus gets significant discounts. On such terms, one can take part in an ICO with some very modest money.
Tokenator is not intending to run an ICO for itself. The company does not comment on the revenues this startup aims to get in a year’s time, nor on its Road Map and development strategy. The startup is nevertheless quite confident about being successful.
Too many ICOs
Why would token issuers grant huge discounts to Tokenator? May be, the case is, such companies are not capable of selling their own tokens?
“The offers are abundant in the market with over 300 ICOs underway at the moment. One needs to make oneself distinguishable in that offer flow, so our service is one of the instruments to accomplish that. Startups like Tokenator’s approach and so they are ready to grant good bonuses for our collective tokens’ purchases”, – Roman Pertsovskiy says. – “Whether they are able or unable to sell their own tokens, a standard ICO mechanism envisages sizeable bonuses at pre-sale to large buyers or Whales, not to those who invest modest moneys raging from few hundred to couple thousand dollars. In our case, Tokenator is such a Whale, so we get a very good discount since we invest very big money. The amount we need is being contributed collectively by all those who wish to buy tokens on advantageous terms. When the scheme is like that, it is win-win for everyone”.
For Tokenator, a big deal is ranging from 60 ETH to 300 ETH (or roughly, $20,000 to $100,000).
Still, one can get use of the deals displayed by Tokenator, during a limited period of time only, while pre-sale is on. To exclude any scam, blockchain projects for Tokenator are selected by a group of experts and investors who analyse projects’ key parameters such as outlooks, business models, team and advisors’ expertise. Such investors also take part in buying tokens at Tokenator platform, but the company declined to name them. Quite possibly, one of such investors will be Elena Masolova, a millionaire and Roman Pertsovskiy’s former boss, founder of Groupon Russia and EdusonTV, who recently invested $300,000 in TokenStars platform for crowdfunding promising athletes. She has been actively participating in Playkey’s ICO discussion in Tokenator’s Telegram chat. Speaking to Invest Foresight, Elena Masolova advised she considers paying $2,000 to $3,000 to buy Playkey tokens at Tokenator.
“With the piling up discussions on whether ordinary investors (who are presumed to be unskilled) may be allowed to engage in cryptoinstruments trade, there emerge various infrastructure intermediaries who undertake the task of a preliminary screening, barring “bad” and letting in “good” ICOs for private investors”, – Professor Artem Genkin, Ph.D., says.
Some while ago, Mr Genkin’s consulting company provided legal support to a major discount service KupiKupon, a Groupon competitor in Russia.
“Whereas thanks to these players there will be less tears shed by the hurt and deceived cryptoinvestors, the market role of the infrastructure intermediaries is positive”, Mr Genkin believes.
By Natalia Kuznetsova