Case Study: how we helped ICO startup Sendy get banked
Introduction
Fred Schebesta, Co-Founder of HiveEx, interviewed Sendy CEO and Co-Founder Philip Slusarski, about the company’s journey of raising funds in an ICO presale and the challenge with getting banked.
Co-Founder Fred Schebesta speaks about how HiveEx helped Sendy get banked
Sendy is an Australian-founded blockchain startup, which is planning to change the way emails are used by rewarding people who open marketing emails with tokens. The team of 13 plus a swag of advisors set out on their project with the launch of their white paper in April 2018, and a private round of fundraising in May. Its ICO presale opened in July, which raised $500,000 worth of Ethereum (ETH).
“We thought the hardest thing was going to be changing our ETH into dollars,” said Philip Slusarski, Sendy CEO and Co-Founder.
“Converting ETH to dollars wasn’t the hardest problem. The hardest problem was getting banked.”
Mr Slursarski said the team sent out 15-20 emails to various banks around Australia as well as from around the world. But they couldn’t find a financial institution to help them open a bank account.
“We were quite transparent with what we are doing, where the proceeds were coming from, the KYC/AML process that we were running,” said Mr Slursarski.
It wasn’t until he got in touch with HiveEx and was finally banked,. HiveEx has partnered with Australian digital bank Goldfields Money, to help ICOs get banked.
“...We worked tirelessly for about two-three months to make sure that everything was compliant. And in the end we managed to bank our seed funds using HiveEx.”
Once the company would raise funds in Ethereum, Mr Slursarski was concerned about being exposed to the movements in price due to the volatility of the cryptocurrency market.
“We didn’t want to raise a certain amount and then three months later the price of Ethereum or bitcoin would fall in half and that would make it difficult to execute our project. So essentially as soon as we received contributions, within a few hours we transferred them to HiveEx, made sure the transaction occurred, and then we’d get it in our bank account. So that gives us no exposure to the wild fluctuations that’s happening at the moment in the crypto world.”