I’d like to rant a little bit. First and foremost I’d like to express that the following are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the combined opinions of any of the companies I’m affiliated with.

That being said, the cryptocurrency industry is so lecherous and scammy that it’s downright disheartening at times.

My company, ODDS, has been initiating our marketing, outreach, and listing processes. I anticipated that there would be expenses incurred, as there are operating costs listing sites and blogs need to cover. For the most part, the sites are asking for agreeable figures — .02 BTC here, 1 ETH there, nothing that’s out of this world. HOWEVER, there are a handful of these sites that are coming so close to extortion, it’s genuinely unbelievable.

I’ve been flat out told, by one site, that I can’t get anything higher than an average rating if I don’t pay them $5k USD+ for a “verified listing”. There have been times where I’ve politely declined and was met with emails threatening to “look further into our offering to be able to warn their customers about us being a potential scam”. I’ve had sites email me that get less than 50 daily unique visitors asking for 1% of our total supply, and 5% of the total amount of money we raise. It’s mind-boggling to me how audacious these people are.

It’s becoming apparently obvious that you pay for integrity in the cryptocurrency world.

Very few of these sites, in particular, the ones with exorbitant fees, do any additional verification (aside from verifying your money is in their wallet). In fact, I am finding that the sites that have the most modest (or occasionally free) pricing models are the most legitimate and trusted platforms.

That’s just the listing sites. From what I’ve found “journalists” in this space are even worse. I’ve been solicited at least once a day by so-called “journalists” who have tiered price lists on their work. Granted, nothing is wrong with getting paid to create content, but when some of your for-sale items are “Positive Review”, “Top 10 List Inclusion”, and “Competitive Commentary” (a nice way of saying I can pay them to write slam pieces on my competition), there is a huge problem. The prices some of these people are asking are insane. One blogger solicited me to write an explicitly positive review, said it would cost 3 BTC. Almost $20k. For one short article.

These two examples are just scratching the surface. Nearly everybody that prefaces their title with “Blockchain”, “Cryptocurrency” or “ICO” charges insane premiums over their traditional counterparts — seemingly for no discernible reason or indicator of specialized industry knowledge.

(Un)surprisingly I’m finding that the “Blockchain”/”Cryptocurrency” prefix on a job title, is often an indicator of ineptitude, not industry experience.

Personally, I am electing to be as conservative as possible when it comes to fees for the aforementioned services. I find it more important to allocate funding towards platform development, team scaling, and into components that will strengthen our offering.

I am fully aware that this decision will result in having less traffic and publicity. Some might say that I am naive and that this is just the way the industry works, but I do not accept that. This is NOT how the industry works, this how scammers, blackmailers and bullies work.

I hope that this article sheds some light on an issue that has been pushed under the rug for far too long. Let’s take a stand and stop enabling these mal-practices — instead, let’s start a conversation about how we can craft a more principled ecosystem.