Monaco Card Rebrands To Crypto.com
After a promising ICO in June 2017, cryptocurrency payments project Monaco has rebranded from Monaco to Crypto.com (brand as well as domain). This is significantly huge news given the owner of crypto.com Matt Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who sits on the board of directors of the Tor Project has fought off all offers for the domain name he registered in 1993.
Back in March 2018, The Verge published a story titled Crypto.com is not for sale. Given the explosion of cryptocurrencies and ICO's, the domain has been sought after by many cryptocurrency projects. Matt Blaze has never been interested in the money, muting people on Twitter and flat out refusing to sell. Even Tweeting in January 2018:
For anyone else trying to contact me for this reason, don't bother. Not for sale.
In a statement on the rebrand CEO Kris Marszalek said:
“This is a very powerful identity that we are taking on. It’s representative of the entire category so it comes with a huge responsibility on us to carry the torch. We don’t take it lightly and this is one of the things that I think we conveyed successfully, that, as a company, we do have a higher purpose,”
Fundamentally, blockchain and crypto will enable [the next generation] to control their money, to control their data and to control their identity, these are the three fundamental things that weave the fabric of society. For us this is the purpose, we want to acceleration the world’s adoption of cryptocurrency
Experts estimate that crypto.com could have sold for upwards of $10 million. The extravagant rebrand sees crypto.com become the parent company, with the cards and wallet app becoming MCO (to be the same name as the Monaco token).
I kind of suspected that Monaco would rebrand to something else after it was revealed that the locality of Monaco might have taken issue with Monaco Card using their name in a business, possibly opening them up to litigation for trademark infringement using the word Monaco in their name.
As part of the rebrand, the crypto.com team have finally released their updated v2 whitepaper which outlines the future of the company, what products to expect, token utility and other pieces of information investors have been clamouring to get a hold of.
The Crypto.com team are currently testing their first-round of Visa cards which will be released in all localities (South East Asia, Europe, America) by Q4 2018.
I saw this on an email when I got up this morning. I looked at their new whitepaper and I like what they are planning to do. I wish they'd hurry up and ship the cards though.
I've been holding these MCO tokens since July 2017, haha. By far my longest non Bitcoin holding of a crypto token. When cards are released though, it's going to be huge for the price and then the slew of other products they're planning on releasing. Secured credit is a great idea.
Totally agree. I was excited by that since I don't have a credit card anymore. Doesn't affect me too much except you can't rent a car without one (as an example). They've certainly got some sweet incentives to buy and hold the tokens. It's one I'm not actually too worried about at the moment.