WE HAVE LIFTOFF

JAN SAMMUT IS HOMEGROWN TALENT, HAILING FROM THE BLOCKCHAIN ISLAND OF MALTA. HAVING TAKEN THE PLUNGE LAUNCHING HIS OWN ICO, HE’S NOW PARLAYING THOSE EFFORTS INTO FACILITATING OTHERS WITH ICO LAUNCH MALTA.

Speak to anyone who’s gone through the launch of an ICO, and a common thread will likely emerge – it’s really hard to get the right advice, and sifting through the chaff can be an expensive process. There is no true substitute for first-hand knowledge, but it’s yet early days in the world of crypto. There’s just not that much surefire experience around. Jan Sammut learned that to his cost as he launched his own ICO. His involvement with RefToken taught a number of expensive and time-consuming lessons which have allowed him to commoditise the process of launching an ICO.

I ask Jan how he got involved in ICOs before most people even had heard of them. He speaks of the experience like it is ancient history – such is the learning curve and the speed of progress. “Back then it was like the Wild West. We did pretty well with it, but then we knew nothing,” he explains. “It was a learning experience. We knew the tech was a really good fix for a real word problem – affiliate fraud. I realised that with smart contracts you could mitigate the problems on both sides of the equation. You can prevent merchants from not paying affiliates, and also mitigate CPA fraud by validating transactions on the blockchain, and make sure there’s no skimming of sales, a massive problem in affiliation”.

I ask him how he got into crypto in the first place, leading him to think up this specific application. “When I first starting looking into Ethereum and started reading about smart contracts, the light bulb switched on,” Jan tells me. “I had been battling the problem for five years of my life. We ran the ICO and it was successful. We built a prototype of the platform, and the beta is being built as we speak, while running in proof-of-concept form on our ICO platform.

In the process, a lot of lessons were learned. Soon enough, Jan noticed that this hard-won experience had a market of its own. “We started getting a lot of inquiries and requests for advice,” he recalls. “I gave all these lawyers crash courses in ICOs. It was staring us in the face that there was a business opportunity here. We were lucky, the timing was great. We pulled in clients, built the ICO platform which is constantly being iterated on, and now we have this incredible code stack which can deploy an ICO in a week”.

I ask him to go into more detail – it almost sounds too good to be true. “If someone has a website and a White Paper signed off by a lawyer, we can add a call to action button and link it to an instance of our ICO platform which we deploy under a sub-domain,” Jan explains. “This means it runs in a distributed manner

– competitors won’t impact other clients”. This means that if one client does something wrong, and gets something like a cease-and-desist letter, there won’t be any impact on anyone else. Jan elaborates – “We take the users from opening up the company, set them up with a legal structure, and we advise them on tokenomic structure – and even write their White Paper – right down to the privacy policy of their website”.

Jan points out that while blockchain has very wide potential applications, it’s important to remember what sets it apart. “What people don’t realise is that blockchain is a very bad way of storing data, if that’s your only requirement – they’re expensive and slow,” he tells me. “It’s suitable to address specific problems. Unless you really have parties with conflicting interests, need to have an accessible ledger, or multiple parties with a financial incentive to cheat – sometimes a normal database will do”. However, as Jan points out, whenever there is a trust gap to be addressed, it is absolutely the right technology for the job. When such a trust gap is bridged, everyone can get on with their business with relative peace of mind. Well, unless they’re in the fraud business.

Much has been made of Malta’s efforts to fashion itself into the leading jurisdiction in blockchain and DLT. In Jan Sammut, it finds some of its most active home-grown talent. Having acquired a wealth of practical experience through RefToken and their portfolio of over 30 ICO clients they’ve assisted to date, he’s now transposing the wealth of his knowledge into ICO Launch Malta. The goal of his new initiative is to allow its clients to really learn from the mistakes of others.

As things stand, ICOs still represent relatively new ground, and first-time entrants to the space are often at a loss for the right auxiliary services. ICO Launch Malta is poised to accelerate the learning curve, and is looking to help a rising ecosystem take flight.