I heard about this new marketplace and was actually rather impressed with their design and presentation and thought they had a shot to replace bitmit.
http://cryptosource.org/coinmart-co-a-cryptocurrency-marketplace-for-btc-ltc-dgc-in-development/http://coinmart.coAfter looking into this further, it appears they are gathering funding and selling shares to make their site a reality:
http://digitalcoin.co/forums/index.php/topic,625.0.htmlhttps://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/dgc-forums-coinmart-new-ebaybitmit-style-market-place-shares-auction-386703I noticed they are taking contributions of 1 BTC for a merchant investor and 5 BTC for Long-term investor. I'm a sucker for clean, responsive design and I considered investing. There was one thing I noticed that really bothered me though, it appears that they had blatantly ripped off much of the art/design which was the only thing that gave the site any value.
I noticed this initially as it appears they ripped off design work that a studio I've hired many times had done for another client. When I started looking up more and more of the images, some of them linked to different accounts on dribbble. Notice the lack of a single drawing/animation of bitcoin in the explainer video and the fact that their logo is superimposed at the end awkwardly, probably got the voiceover off fiverr. I wouldn't be surprised if the mockup was stolen as well and just edited a few times with bitcoin relevant users.
So essentially what we end up with is someone looking for up to $100k+ worth of coins in exchange for a bunch of stolen images and a promise to make a useful website. Obviously can't say for sure whether this is just a scam, but stealing all that design reflects pretty poorly on them and certainly makes it seem like they had only put a few hours and $5 into their current version and are looking to make out with a quick buck.
This is obviously just speculation, I can't say they are scammers but it appears like they are thieves. They could very well take those investments and make a kick-ass website, it just seems quite deceptive. This sort of behavior is often indicative of poor character/untrustworthiness.
If coinmart can provide evidence that they have permission to use these images and didn't just steal them, I will gladly lock this and consider an investment. I just wanted to post my thoughts on this before it gained more steam, I'd appreciate it if someone could link this onto the digital coin forum if you see this as I do not have an account there.
Examples of stolen work:
http://dribbble.com/pixelvuWill add more tomorrow as I find them.
Owners response on reddit when I asked if he did the design work behind the site: