To hype or not to hype?

Back in early May I wrote a piece about Lendingblock who had just completed their ICO. 'To hodl or not to hodl’ was primarily to discuss why it was worthwhile to hold on to lnd tokens given the huge promise shown by the company. 2 months on I have decided to have a look at the roll of ‘hype’ in Lendingblock and why there appears to be an almost complete absence of it.

Most ICOs do attempt to hype their product and in a lot of cases this hype does help to gain initial investors and to put the company ‘out there’. Numerous ICOs in recent history have been hyped to the heavens and some have performed well out of the blocks. However, most of these were not able to resist the pull of the bear market downwards and have since suffered large depreciations in their token price. At the end of the day what will matter is the actual product and what sector of the new blockchain economy will be disrupted.

Lendingblock appeared to come onto the scene under the radar. There was some momentary hype perhaps when Ian Ballina noticed the company, saw the potential, and bought in as a private investor. However, when Lendingblock listed on Idex and a couple of small exchanges, the price did the usual thing and dumped hard. Main sale price of 0.02 cents went as low as 0.005 in recent times.

Maybe other companies would have resorted to further marketing to try to improve the price and exposure of the company — not Lendingblock. Things went fairly quiet and their telegram group (like most) was reduced to “When big exchange?”, “Pay for a big exchange!”. The lendingblock team, headed up by Steve Swain CEO and Linda Wang CCO quietly kept on working.

Lendingblock has chosen the route of proactively being ‘fully regulated’ because when the crypto economy takes off and Wall street starts to move funds in, the huge institutional investors are going to want total financial regulatory compliance and they will want to deal with a team in which they can trust. Lendingblock totally fits the bill. Financial tools need to be in place for the big institutional investment to come and Lendingblock will fill the niche of fully collateralised crypto to crypto loans platform.

So, what progress have Lendingblock made? A huge amount! recently, a partnership was announced with ‘Octagon Strategy’ who are the third biggest digital asset brokerage firm globally and the biggest in Asia Pacific. According to the CEO of Octagon Strategy Wayne Trench, “We’re very pleased to be working with the innovative team at Lendingblock as they bring the securities lending model to the digital assets economy. They are a team who understand institutional needs, and clearly have the experience and expertise to deliver. We look forward to working together to fill this gap in the market.”

Also, more recently, Lendingblock partnered with ‘Quoine’ one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges which embraces ‘Quoinex’, ‘Cryptos’ and also ‘Liquid’. Seth Melamed, Senior Vice President and Head of operations at Quoine said “We are truly excited to be a part of the innovation Lendingblock is bringing to the blockchain financial services ecosystem. Both of our communities will benefit from the partnership by making new pools of liquidity available”. This partnership means that Quoine and its customers will be users of Lendingblock.

Latest news is that Lendingblock have announced a partnership with ‘Genesis Capital’ who will form part of Lendingblock’s advisory group. Given that Genesis are a fully compliant platform for large size institutional fiat to crypto lending of some years standing, they will be able to advise on how to cater to the exacting standards of these large institutions.

According to Steve Swain, the announcements made so far are only the tip of the iceberg and there are many more exciting partnerships to come.

To conclude, Lendingblock needs no hype — it needs no ‘shilling’. The product is being built and world class institutions are looking at what Lendingblock is going to offer and should be impressed with what they see. The platform will be open to institutional investors in Q1 2019 and the sky is the limit. When your product needs no hype you must have a great idea and a very strong team to see it through — Lendingblock has both!

This is not financial advice and you should always do your own research before investing in cryptocurrencies.