TaTaTu, after raising $575M from royals and celebs in a private 2018 ICO for a blockchain-based Netflix-like service, now says it is not a blockchain business
Leigh Cuen / CoinDesk : Tweets: @lopp , @ercwl , @decntrlzd , @aridavidpaul , @raetoken , @atrissidoarjo , @aridavidpaul , @zooko , @aridavidpaul , @aridavidpaul , @udiwertheimer , @mdudas , @coindesk , and @la__cuen Tweets: Jameson Lopp / @lopp : They should use some of the ICO funds to shoot a movie about how they spent the ICO funds, then they can stream it on the platform for which they raised the ICO. Eric Wall / @ercwl : > Antonio Banderas recieves TaTaTu ERC20 tokens for starring in a Lamborghini movie This is the most 2018 thing I've heard since Steven Seagal got hit by a cease-and-desist order for ICOing “Bitcoiin”, the superior and more advanced version of Original Bitcoin. Dan / @decntrlzd : Great thing when reaching out to Tatatu, they were using Gmail accounts, and had no real interest in content and never saw anything thru. pic.twitter.com/yG9CboWkWO Ari Paul / @aridavidpaul : Nope. We did receive compensation as advisers however well before token launch. Haven't been in contact with the team since shortly after the token came into existence. @raetoken : Can't wait for the rest 🍿 Even though all ICO's are fundamentally broken, @TaTaTu_Official really went above and beyond. https://twitter.com/... Atris Sidoarjo / @atrissidoarjo : What started as a $575 million token sale is now a rewards program for watching videos. TaTaTu's initial coin offering (ICO) [1] was among the ... readmore https://bitcoinsidoarjo.com/ ... #bitcoin Ari Paul / @aridavidpaul : Yea, I like the term “accidental scam” for a lot of crypto projects. The teams might be well intentioned but overpromise to a degree that borders on unethical. The initial roadmap for Tatatu seemed plausible to me. @zooko : I'm very enthusiastic about society being able to learn from “back-testing” and to benefit by holding people accountable for what they did, and I'm delighted about Leigh's article about this TaTaTu thing. Ari Paul / @aridavidpaul : Tatatu is the biggest project you haven't heard of. *disclosure, we have economic exposure. https://medium.com/... Ari Paul / @aridavidpaul : 1/ I'm excited for projects that will spread cryptocurrency beyond the current <0.5% of the world that holds it. Tatatu is a crypto driven content platform that's likely to get major mainstream traction. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ ... @udiwertheimer : Wait @AriDavidPaul's firm invested in this? Lololololol Mike Dudas / @mdudas : Called this one from a mile away..."TaTaTu offers a prime example of a platform that used ‘blockchain’ as a fundraising technique and then largely moved on."https://www.coindesk.com/ ... via @La__Cuen @coindesk : From yachting with Selena Gomez to doling out TaTaTu tokens to movie stars, one producer's road to Hollywood was paved with ICO excess. Report by @La__Cuen https://www.coindesk.com/... Leigh Cuen / @la__cuen : This summer I'm following up with several ICO projects to see where they are now. This one deserves to be made into a movie 👇😮 https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
TaTaTu's $575M private-sale ICO in July 2018 was pitched as funding for a blockchain-based social entertainment platform plus original movie production, with royals and celebrities among the buyers. A year later the company says it is not a blockchain business at all, and per the reported relationships its token has been repurposed into a rewards program for watching videos.
The retreat lands in a corpus already skeptical of the format: Smith + Crown counted 65 projects raising $522M in 2017 while warning about the unregulated nature of ICOs (that early warning), Tezos' $232M raise had already curdled into what Wired called the crypto world's biggest scandal (the Tezos saga), and commentators here openly mock the raise as blockchain-as-fundraising-technique.
First-order effects
- Token holders — including celebrity participants like Antonio Banderas, who reportedly received TaTaTu ERC20 tokens for starring in a Lamborghini movie — are left holding an asset whose stated purpose has been abandoned and whose utility is now watch-to-earn points.
- TaTaTu must reposition as a conventional streaming/content business while explaining why a company that disclaims blockchain kept the proceeds of one of the largest token sales of 2018.
Second-order effects
- Every other celebrity-fronted token project faces the same credibility test; the criticism of stars hyping crypto without flagging risks that surfaced after the 2022 sell-off (celebrity hype backlash) gets an earlier, cleaner case study in TaTaTu.
- The influencer-promotion economy documented around Kim Kardashian, FaZe Clan and Elon Musk takes reputational damage, since paid endorsements of tokens can outlive the token's own reason to exist.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry splits structurally between teams that use tokens as products and teams that used them as financing wrappers — deepening the legitimacy gap between the two and inviting regulators to treat post-hoc abandonment of a token's purpose as evidence in fraud assessments.
The trend: The 2017–18 ICO cohort is being sorted into real protocol businesses and ventures that used blockchain purely as a fundraising wrapper, with TaTaTu's retreat a high-profile data point in that sorting.