I don't see any usecases for Viber coins. I personally use Viber, and don't understand how they want to apply crypto in Viber application globally.
I don't get it much, Viber is a very good app for messaging and i admire the technology they are sharing to the people to communicate,
they are so successful, and now they are having an ICO, is this for money matter? what will Viber need an ICO for?
I wonder what will be the purpose of having a cryptocurrency. Viber is pretty much a free service, I don't see any uses for these tokens and don't think it will carry much value. It just seems like every platform with millions of users are hopping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon.
Not a Viber user so can't say for sure, but can assume that like any other messanger they're following a few simple goals:
- raise money on ICO for further product development and to be able to compete in the future with such a strong competitor like Telegram or others;
- if Viber is completely free to use now, they will add for sure some paid functionality in the future and make all the in app purchases and additional services available only in their coins so as to provide demand and raise in price of their coin and get more additional profit out of the coins.
Despite Viber is not widespread worldwide but if they really have 900 million active users in Russia like it stated above, it is still a huge audience which can ensure a huge profit for them.
It's a wrong business strategic move if they go through with offering a cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency industry is flooded with scams. This could ruin their platform and eliminate many users if scams start to pop up on Viber. They are better off implementing ads if they need to raise funds.
Well, I agree with you that it could be not so wise business move from their side if they run ICO, make their own cryptocurrency and make a solid ground for the number of scums growth this way. But you know, like people say, money rules the world. It's too hard for the business to resist against such an easy way of collecting additional money like ICO or new own coin launch, especially if the business already has a working product and huge user database.
All the ICO risks could be justified as scums cannot affect much on the service reputation like we can see on Telegram example. Probably thousands of scams stole an enormous amount of money running fake Telegram ICOs but there is no sign for Telegram that bad days are coming for their business. There is no news about Telegram losing their users. If they fail one day to implement all the ICO promises, it will be the case and we'll see the end of their business. Only time will show what would be next.
The interesting point to admit regarding the Telegram closed ICO is that they didn't announce their coin offering officially, just posted anonymously unconfirmed whitepaper and that's all. This way no one can blame them for any funds being stolen by different scams and no accusations can be filed. Had they run a public ICO and announce it officially, I'm sure we'd see a new ICO record of officially collected funds as well as a new record of funds stolen, as usually people are as eager for easy money as businesses.
Looks like Viber is considering implementing something similar to what Telegram did, we'll see. Who knows, maybe a potential estimated profit Viber can get out of advertising isn't big enough to cover further competition and product development. If they have 900 million users, they can also take such risks like Telegram did, cause in any case they won't lose all their active users and can even engage more ones due to ICO hype.