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Emirati royals back forthcoming Ethereum “DeFi” offering

source-logo  decrypt.co 10 October 2019 06:00, UTC

Two Emirati royals are backing an obscure crypto token billing itself as the “first” to have won the endorsement of a royal family.  

Khalfan Saeed Khalfan Al Mazrouei and Sheikh Abdullah Bin Rashed Al Sharqi are both shareholders of the company behind Crypto Price Index, a cryptocurrency whose value supposedly represents the aggregate of the top 200 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. 

Laboring under the ever-popular DeFi banner (shorthand for “decentralized finance”), “CPI” purports to be “bringing a global level of stability and recognition to the emerging class of DeFi protocols which market commentators expect to disrupt the financial industry.” The token is also coordinating an ICO with “award winning” Malta-based token launch platform ICOMalta. (We tried to sign up but a promised login email never arrived.)

CPI is partnered with ZBX, an exchange spun up with Turnkey solution “Zillion Bits,” which neither appears on CoinMarketCap nor registers any pageviews on SimilarWeb.

At the same time, it’s unclear whether it is indeed the first time their excellencies have endorsed a crypto product. Al Mazrouei has his name plastered on multiple other crypto businesses online, including Bondchain Management Consulting and Locus Chain. Al Sharqi, for his part, doesn’t seem to have done much to do with blockchain, but was appointed Vice-President for Asia by the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness.

Neither is it clear exactly how the royals were incentivized to support the startup, and a courtier (well, the ZBX spokesperson) did not respond for comment. 

Nevertheless, here’s how CPI purports to work, according to its white paper: CPI is like an index fund, except it’s not. Instead, the price of the CPI token itself represents the investments, and is constantly adjusted to reflect the aggregate notional market value of the 200 top cryptocurrencies, which is apparently around $17 (as of press time). As such, the CPI token shows “at a glance the average price of every single top 200 crypto asset by market cap which are trading on exchanges.”

It’s actually not a terrible idea, given that curating 200 separate assets all at once would prove remarkably unwieldy. But the problem is that, even before the 200 mark, a great portion of the cryptocurrencies included are functionally dead. Their price will be swallowed by Bitcoin. Who would invest in “DentaCoin” or “Robotina,” even without the benefit of a CPI token usefully streamlining the process? 

Given that a much-ballyhooed “shitcoin index” composed of some of the better performing altcoins recently tanked, we keenly await CPI’s release: if not for our sake, for the royals’. 

decrypt.co