Bitfinex, Kim Dotcom call off Kimcoin token sale due to regulatory concerns

Kim Dotcom, the father of the file-sharing, copyright-infringing racket Megaupload, won’t be launching a blockchain token for his new K.im project after all—at least, not any time soon.

Today, Bitfinex—the beleaguered, Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange currently battling a fraud investigation launched by the New York State Attorney General, announced that the Kimcoin token sale has been halted due to “regulatory uncertainty.”

Bitfinex and the Kim Dotcom team have “mutually agreed” to “indefinitely postpone” the sale of Kimcoin, according to a statement from from Bitfinex. “K.im will defer any decision on whether to create tokens on, or undertake a token issue in relation to the K.im platform until it is fully functional,” wrote a Bitfinex spokesperson. 

“In the meantime, the K.im platform project itself will continue and it is likely that an equity based offer will be made some time in the near future to qualifying investors who wish to become involved at this stage of the project.”

K.im is a platform where users can monetize files on their computer, hosted on cloud services like Dropbox, and sell them. In the demo provided to Decrypt, it was trivially easy to upload copyrighted content to the platform, and sell it for $100. 

Kim Dotcom, who previously went to prison for issues relating to copyright infringement, told Decrypt that the platform would sort out the issue. However, K.im was designed in such a way that it prevented the administrators of the platform, and hosting services like Dropbox, from determining the contents of the files.