Social Media App Snapchat Officially Confirmed the Ban of ICO Ads

| Updated
by Julia Sakovich · 3 min read
Social Media App Snapchat Officially Confirmed the Ban of ICO Ads
Photo: Perzonseo Webbyra / Flickr

Following such giants as Facebook, Google and Twitter, Snapchat has officially announced its ban of ICO advertising on its platform.

As it has been announced, Snap Inc. took a decision to ban advertising of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) in the Snapchat app. The parent firm Snap Inc. has started gradually implementing its new policies since February. It has begun with restrictions for crypto-token sales advertising without banning those related to cryptocurrency more generally.

Speaking about prohibiting ICO ads in Snapchat, the company representative didn’t say anything about their plans to impose the ban to other crypto related activities ads.

Snapchat has joined the group of other social media giants to prohibit ads for ICOs. Earlier, Facebook, Google and Twitter have informed about their new policies regarding advertising of this increasingly popular form of attracting funds by issuing virtual tokens instead of more traditional company shares.

But unlike, for example, bans imposed by Snap Inc. that have come into force in February, Google’s ban that includes ads on subsidiary platforms such as Youtube will become effective only in the up-coming June. Twitter is reported to plan to implement the announced ban in the coming weeks. There is no final confirmation, nevertheless, it is said that its ban will be also applied not only to ICOs ads but also it will affect cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges with some exceptions.

These bans followed a countless amount of warnings from regulatory bodies and authorities that expressed their concerns with this market, including warnings on ICOs from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The authority said that many crypto tokens could be considered unregistered securities.

In contract to raising funds through traditional IPOs, that takes a lot of time and money, attracting money for projects through ICOs is a simpler and more comfortable task. As companies can spare a significant part of its funds and can complete the whole process in just three months.  Thanks to ICOs companies raised billions of dollars in 2017.

Nevertheless, this extreme popularity of this method of raising money has led to special attention and control from the side of the Securities and Exchange Commission, given the large number of scams within the industry. As a result, rather a long list of ICOs have received subpoenas from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

While some people have already managed to earn quite impressive amounts of money in the crypto sector, others have lost maybe even more. As we know from the experience of stock markets players, it is not a win-win game, there are always winners and losers. But with practically no regulation, cryptocurrency scams are too widespread.  Some crypto scams victims have lost all their savings, cars and real estate.

Despite the fact that it was quite obvious that advertising ban would cause rather controversial reaction in the cryptocurrency world, the decision to ban some specific types of ads was taken by the platforms with a view to protect people.

Altcoin News, Cryptocurrency News, News
Related Articles