Summary: Listia/Ink Protocol will airdrop our future Ink Protocol Tokens to current holders of Confido (CFD) tokens (as of 1:30PM PST 11/20/17).* Our vision is to help build the decentralized marketplaces of the future, and we originally thought they had a cool project that shared the same vision. However, they appear to have scammed thousands of people, so we want to step in and help the community, by distributing at least $150K worth of our own reputation and payments token to CFD holders via airdrop for free.

Update: We will now include people who sold at a loss or who had their CFD tokens in an exchange like Kucoin or Etherdelta at the time of the snapshot. If that is you, please fill out this form.

Here is the full story and details of what we want to do:

The team here at Listia/Ink Protocol just learned about a potential scam involving a project called Confido. They appear to have sold tokens to investors at a relatively low valuation, generating demand and causing the price to spike after the ICO on exchanges. They then possibly continued to sell tokens into this spike and then disappeared completely as of this morning. Their official stance is that they ran into legal issues, but the community at large has investigated and believes otherwise:

https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@royaldutch/confido-cfd-is-a-scam-let-s-analyse-what-is-happening-right-now-updated

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7e87kc/confido_just_deleted_everything_proving_their/

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7e8p15/official_announcement_from_chrisconfidosupport/

This is beyond horrifying and gives everyone working hard on legitimate blockchain and crypto projects a bad name. It was even more frustrating to read the personal accounts of people who were defrauded of their money. Participating in early crypto projects is always going to be a very risky endeavor, because of the general uncertainty surrounding blockchain technology, but outright fraud should never be part of the picture. Unfortunately, it’s the reality that crypto and blockchain enthusiasts, developers, entrepreneurs, and investors have to deal with.

Interestingly, in this case, we feel like we are in a position to help the community and some of the people involved. Here’s why:

The Confido project first popped on our radar last week. It was brought to our attention by members of our Telegram community and other Slack communities where we participate. We looked closely at the project because what they wanted to do was also an important use case for our own Ink Protocol project. If you don’t know, they wanted to help people buy and sell safely online by providing an escrow service with built-in and decentralized shipping confirmation. This functionality is also built into our own Ink Protocol, although we are more focused on decentralizing the reputation of sellers in addition to the actual payment, escrow and dispute resolution flow.

Our long term goal is to fully decentralize ALL p2p marketplaces, starting with our own marketplace, Listia.com. So, you can see why safely paying and confirming delivery in a decentralized way is a key part of this goal. Like everyone who bought into their project, we thought their solution was quite interesting. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to conceptualize a clever solution without actually executing and delivering on it.

Because of this, we feel like we can help. We believe that anyone who bought into Confido’s vision is also someone that could be interested in what we are building here at Ink Protocol. *So, as long as there are no legal or regulatory issues, today we are committing to setting aside an allocation of our future Ink Protocol Tokens which will be airdropped to all Confido (CFD) token holders as of 11/20/17 1:30PM PST. We decided to lock down one point in time, just so nobody will decide to speculate further on CFD based on this news. We have already taken a snapshot of the tokens holders based on the list here:

https://etherscan.io/token/0x14839bf22810f09fb163af69bd21bd5476f445cd#balances

This means that an allocation of Ink Protocol Tokens (when they are available) will be airdropped pro-rata among the CFD token holders in our snapshot (minus any obvious Confido owned accounts or exchange addresses). You do not have to do anything if you own CFD. We will simply deposit them into the listed Ethereum addresses when ready and update our blog with confirmation. We have not decided on the total $ amount we can afford for the allocation yet, but it will be at least $150K USD worth, based on the starting price of the token at launch. This is close to the approximate value of the current non-exchange and non Confido-owned tokens as far as we can tell.

Update: We will now include people who sold at a loss or who had their CFD tokens in an exchange like Kucoin or Etherdelta at the time of the snapshot. If that is you, please fill out this form.

We hope this will help the community at large in some way.

Who are we? Listia Inc. runs a p2p marketplace for used goods called Listia that has been around for over 8 years. Our team has been working together for just as long in some cases. We are backed by investors who have steered us in the right direction from day one, like Y Combinator, A16Z seed, SV Angel, General Catalyst and many more. We know what it takes to build a product and execute a vision and are currently focused on making Ink Protocol and decentralized marketplaces a reality.

Our vision for fully decentralized marketplaces is a big one, and we need the support of the community to make it happen. Thank you to everyone who has shown interest so far! We will have some more exciting announcements coming soon and hope this is a small step in the right direction.

-The Listia/Ink Protocol Team