In North America, $17.2 billion is generated through crowdfunding each year. Despite the ease of use and the potential to rapidly acquire cash, most crowdfunding platforms operating today come with inherent risks for project creators and investors. Earlier this year, a New Jersey resident was sentenced to 27 months in prison for running a crowdfunding scam on GoFundMe where he raised more than $400,000, falsely claiming it was all to help a homeless veteran.
Fraudulent campaigns like this GoFundMe case occur frequently and exploit donors as well as investors who provide funds in equity-crowdfunding campaigns. For project creators the risk revolves around privacy and safeguarding the project’s sensitive details, and for investors it has to do with fraud. While some of these crowdfunding platforms have made attempts to combat scams and fraudulent projects, the vast majority fail to effectively protect investors and entrepreneurs.
One platform is tackling these challenges head on by leveraging blockchain, a technology that perhaps offers almost everything crowdfunding today currently lacks. Built on the Binance Smart Chain, SeedOn features a unique smart-contract escrow model to verify projects on three levels before they can start raising funds, offering the highest level of security and transparency to counter fraudulent attempts to scam investors.
“Equity crowdfunding provides great value for both investor and project creator, but transparency and security are a necessity. This is exactly why we built our solution on blockchain and developed our smart contract escrow model,” said Constantin-Claudiu Minea, Co-Founder and CEO of SeedOn.
SeedOn has now officially begun the process of vetting several projects through a thorough screening process that can take a couple of months. The process starts with an AI algorithm checking for copyright infringements, and ultimately ends up with a human manually checking and validating the AI system’s findings.
SeedOn protects project creators by requiring investors to sign an NDA, which protects intellectual property by only allowing registered investors access to the project’s sensitive information.
SeedOn makes equity crowdfunding safer for investors and entrepreneurs alike by leveraging the transparency provided by blockchain technology. The platform releases the raised funds in stages based on the achievement of specific milestones, returning remaining funds if a project falls short of any milestone. Projects looking to raise money on SeedOn undergo a three-step verification procedure before they are approved.
To participate in a SeedOn crowdfunding campaign, investors simply purchase SEON, SeedOn’s native token, on a public exchange to then deposit into the SeedOn Finance wallet. Users can also pay with fiat money either directly on SeedOn—which is then converted to SEON on the platform’s backend—to raise the balance of SEON in the investor’s wallet, or pay directly through the crowdfunding campaign investment section, offering a viable option to non-crypto holders. SeedOn offered two pre-sales, one private and one public, during SEON’s token launch in December 2021, collectively raising $1.4 million and selling out the second presale in under five hours.
“We are currently vetting a handful of projects for our platform, and we are excited to onboard innovative Web3.0 projects and start the process of transforming the crowdfunding industry,” said Minea.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Source: https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2022/09/seedon-onboards-projects-ahead-of-its-web3-crowdfunding-platform-launch