Note: Charlie Shrem is a bitcoin advocate who co-founded a bitcoin exchange start-up Bitinstant in 2011. The company charged a fee for users to purchase and make purchases with bitcoins at over 700,000 locations. On January 27, 2014, Charlie Shrem was arrested at New York’s JFK airport and charged with “conspiring to commit money laundering by selling more than $1 million in bitcoins to users of the black market website Silk Road”. BitInstant website has been blank since then. Charlie was sentenced to two years behind bars, serving his time at Lewisburg Federal Prison Camp in Pennsylvania. He has now been released from imprisonment and is serving three years of supervised release.

Charlie Shrem started a webcast on a Chinese livestream platform on Feb.27th, saying he was very excited to move forward onto new projects. The show started at 10:30 a.m. and lasted for 30 minutes with over 1000 audience.

“I am about to introduce a crowdfunded investment fund called Mainstreet to Chinese investors. The fund is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain based on real world assets like real estate, as well as bitcoin and blockchain businesses.”

Gong Ming, a researcher of blockchain tech and founder of ChainB. com, (a blockchain website) noted that Charlie Shrem will focus its invest in U.S. middle-market operating companies and the first one is a sanitary waste business. Any dividends will be payed to investors over the Ethereum blockchain to create an unchangeable record of payments.

Mainstreet held a crowdsale of 50 million tokens on Jan. 15, 2017 with an initial token offering of $25 million.

When being questioned why the fund is only open to Chinese investors, Charlie explained that.

“I love Chinese culture and I hope to work with Chinese investors for win-win outcomes.”

Some industrial players doubt that the truth is he doesn’t want to get involved with the US government or any legal matters in that regard.

Liu Xinyu, a senior partner of Dacheng Law Offices, warns that Chinese investors should consider it as carrying a “high degree of risk”. He suggests that no investment should be made without detailed info about the following questions.

Is there a maximum amount of token holders? How to be a accredited investor for Chinese investors? Who is the owner of all those digital assets? How to verify project info? How to protect the interest of token holders? How to sell tokens? To whom?

PS: Many Chinese netizens made negative comments about Charlie’s new projects.

“This guy is a conman. Do not believe him.”

“Only open to Chinese investors? Are we really that gullible ?”