PressCoin opens USD$100mln ICO

Sunday, 10 December 2017

PressCoin opens USD$100mln ICO, the largest ever crowdfunded response to the News Crisis

Sunday, 10 December 2017 - San Mateo, California: PressCoin’s ICO which opens today, is the largest crowdfunded project for independent news media ever attempted.

It is needed. Trust in news media is at a global, all time low. And democracy is failing because of it.

Over the past 10 years, many solutions have been promoted to solve the news crisis, but so far all have failed.

PressCoin is different from anything tried before, the first solution designed to grow organically, and find a cure to the disease killing the global news industry, a.k.a. The Attention Economy.

“We are building the infrastructure, shared business services, shared crypto/fiat financial services, and reference platforms for an effective, network response to all that is presently wrong in the news industry,” says PressCoin PLC co-founder Amit Rathore.

It does this by:

• radically lowering barriers to full participation by small and medium news players;
• building a united group of platforms and partner publishers, who seamlessly cooperate and share technology and business infrastructure, to redress the imbalance in power of the news platform giants.
• and, by creating a new internal marketplace for independent news organisations, independent journalists, and news-services companies to trade with each other in their own currency.

“We expect this technology-focused, innovation-friendly approach to throw up more new business and engagement models, taking news beyond advertising, beyond the attention economy that is killing it."

"The news culture needs rapid experimentation and innovation, failing fast on things that don’t work, and quickly scaling up things that do. This is in addition to the innovative new revenue streams already being worked on,” says Mr Rathore

PressCoin is issuing a new cryptocurrency (ticker NEWS ) by way of a crowd-sale. The UK-based company has staff in the United States, United Kingdom, India, France, and New Zealand.

Mr Rathore, born in Bangalore India, and now based in San Francisco works in venture capital, blockchain, crypto-fintech, digital media, and e-commerce. He has a background in developing both high-tech media technology cloud software (Quintype), and crypto/fiat banking and trading platforms (CointypeX). Both are companies Mr Rathore co-founded. His previous background is in large-scale Internet e-commerce. Another company he co-founded Runa was acquired by Staples in 2013, the world's third largest e-commerce business.

With PressCoin, working with a large group of leading journalists, an enthusiastic and growing group of volunteers, and with the assistance of some corporate-banking friends, Amit Rathore is bringing these crypto and news media worlds together.

The PressCoin Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which begins on Monday December 11th, and runs for four weeks, will join a wave of technology ICOs which started in July this year.

An ICO involves the creation of a new cryptocurrency and selling this on an open market, in a similar way to the listing of a company under an Initial Public Offering (IPO). A feature, or perhaps limitation, of the ICO market is that most require investment to be paid for in existing cryptocurrencies.

“PressCoin tokens are unique,” says Mr Rathore. ”Thanks to the KYC (Know Your Customer) - enabled CointypeX gateway, PressCoin is among the first ICOs in the world to accept fiat money in exchange for NEWS tokens, while respecting appropriate legal restrictions in various countries. The Swiss-bank infrastructure is invaluable to making this happen."

Further, in another innovation each PressCoin token is equity-backed, linked via smart-contract to an individual share in UK-based PressCoin PLC. And each NEWS token is also eligible for dividends.

“The PressCoin ICO is crypto-fundraising done right", says Mr Rathore, "rewarding supporters with real, value-producing, asset-backed backed tokens, and long term revenue streams and innovation.”

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More details at PressCoin.com, and the ICO can be found atico.presscoin.com.

To arrange interviews with PressCoin PLC. Director Amit Rathore, Dr Nafeez Ahmed or other participants in the PressCoin project please contact pr@presscoin.com in the first instance.

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