The LGBT Foundation has announced a new class of digital tokens aimed at harnessing the purchasing power of the gay community.
The latest trend in digital tokens could be the purchasing power of minority communities.
Companies from Kodak to Atari have used blockchain, a decentralized ledger to record transactions, as an alternative to traditional financing. Now fringe organizations are starting to do the same, and some companies could be the biggest beneficiaries.
On Thursday, the LGBT Foundation, a Hong Kong-based non-profit organization dedicated to helping gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people around the world, announced that it will launch its own digital token on the blockchain. The goal, explains the organization’s president, Christof Wittig, is to generate capital to support persecuted LGBT people around the world. Meanwhile, several LGBT businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area have agreed to accept the “pink dollar” as a form of payment for goods and services.
The advantage of trading these “currencies,” analysts say, is that they can be freely traded on online exchanges and thus offer investors greater liquidity than more traditional equity investments. In so-called Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) or fundraising events where digital tokens are made available to the public, some companies have raised the equivalent of millions of dollars in real money.
Although more than half of the world’s ICOs did not generate value in 2017, successful startups raised a total of $ 5.6 billion, an average of more than $ 12 million each, according to a recent study by the equity fund of risk Fabric Ventures and cryptocurrency data provider TokenData. In fact, Wittig’s goal is to generate real money: the foundation wants to raise $ 50 million through a coin offering in a
