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bne May 2018 Companies & Markets I 21
to attract investors far beyond Russia. In the case of Play2live, “30% of the money came from China, about 20% from Vietnam, 15% came from South Korea, 8% came from the US,” Budyrko said, “while just about 10% came from Russia.”
As for VRT World’s investors, they came from no fewer than 21 countries, the company’s CEO Konstantin Negachev confirmed in an exchange with EWDN.
AB-Chain, whose ad network platform – launched just two months ago – uses cryptocurrencies and smart contracts, had its latest pre-sale investor come from China.
Dbrain, a Russian-Belarusian blockchain startup that offers to “collectively build full-stack AI apps,” secured a $2.5mn pre-ICO seed round at the beginning of the year. The funding came from funds based in Moscow, New York, Singapore
and Sydney, as well as from Russian business angels Eduard Gurinovich (CarPrice, CarMoney and mytime ) and Leo Batalov (DLA Piper), Dbrain CMO Ivan Gorshunov told EWDN.
Legitimate projects, marketing fluff
and unscrupulous scams
In Russia as elsewhere, not all fundraising announcements correspond to reality. “The market, still largely unregulated, is infected by fraudulent ventures or simply dubious PR strategies. Some announcements just aim to create some
bne:FX
Trump’s trade war brinksmanship pushes Turkish lira to fresh record low
bne IntelliNews
The Turkish lira (TRY) tested a new record low of 4.0368 against the dollar during early trading hours of March 23 as anxiety over Donald Trump triggering a US-China trade war combined with existing concerns over worsening economic imbalances in Turkey’s economy.
buzz and attract naive investors,” notes a Moscow blockchain entrepreneur who wished to remain unnamed.
“That kind of thing could kill the market,” he fears, while conceding that there’s a number of fully legitimate projects, too, on the scene.
And on a completely different scale, Telegram – whose Russian founder Pavel Durov left his country a few years ago – is dis- creetly conducting a second private token sale, having raised
“Last year saw more than 130 ICOs and pre-ICOs conducted by companies with Russian roots”
$850mn from 81 investors (including Silicon Valley funds Benchmark and Sequoia Capital) during the first one. Telegram is already going down in history as the largest ICO to date, breaking the record set by Tezos last year ($232mn).
This giant ICO is controversial, too, with skeptics seeing it as just marketing fluff, while enthusiasts believe in Durov’s plans to create a new type of blockchain.
The TRY also tested a record low of 4.9757 against the euro. However, by close of trade on March 23 it had recovered to 3.9605 against the dollar and 4.8950 to the euro.
March 23 also saw the cost of insuring exposure to Turkish
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