Wall Street Journal published a dedicated piece on Paycoin on the day of its "ICO", initial coin offering, for select clientele (the public ICO is scheduled for 12 days from now).
Examined on its own, without scrutiny, one gets a very different impression of GAW than from a plethora of material on less prominent forums, which have accused GAW of scam-like practices. The controversy is not referenced in the WSJ piece. Only passing mention of the "lawsuit-prone Bitcoin mining industry" in general is made toward the end.
Following are some of the notable assertions:
- Paycoin's anticipated market cap will be $250 million (roughly equal to that of Ripple ), "partly backed" with fiat worth $100 million.
- Stuart Fraser, Vice Chairman and Partner at Cantor Fitzgerald LP is said to be a "long-time backer of Mr. Garza's projects". His profile page on Cantor Fitzgerald mentions "ownership interests in Great Auk Wireless", also abbreviated GAW. Garza, according to his Linkedin page, was CEO at the company for 9 years until 2012. A Linkedin page for Stuart Fraser says he is a partner in GAW Labs (the crypto company) and an owner in GAW (the internet/wireless company), although the former is not mentioned on the Cantor Fitzgerald page.
- Garza's mining operation is run out of a 180,000-foot Mississippi warehouse with 15MW electricity capacity.
- His service now accounts for "a whopping 50% of all new mining capacity coming online."
- After starting operations only this past summer, "GAW is on track to finish the year with $120 million in sales." Such a figure is in line with previous PRs by the company, one of which declared it sold “$1M units [sic] overnight” as the Hashlet became the most popular miner in the world. Such figures indicate that GAW is by far the most successful bitcoin company in the world, having accomplished this feat in but a few months....
