Salarium Readies ICO To Drive Fundraising

The concept of an initial coin offering (ICO) sets a lot of cryptocurrency buffs out there to slavering, and there’s a new one that recently hit that may have drawn quite a bit of interest. Salarium, a company that focuses on payroll and human resources (HR) offerings released its SALPay token into the wild in a bid to help raise $20 million for its operation.

Salarium has been operating since 2013, and uses its SALPay token as a means for users to send payroll cash into the Philippines. Judah Hirsch, the company’s CEO and founder, noted that the funds raised will be used not only to set up the exchange to make SALPay a full-on cryptocurrency, but also to give the company some extra liquidity. Hirsch further notes that the product is “…already live and working.”

The token pre-sale has long since expired, but the ICO itself went through the end of the year. Salarium focuses on small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the Philippines, particularly in the business process outsourcing (BPO), information technology, and manufacturing fields.

While ICOs are proving an increasingly popular way to catch cryptocurrency enthusiasts’ interest and raise some cash in the process, more than a few are concerned about the overall direction. Two major cryptocurrency operators—Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Etherium’s co-founder Joseph Lubin—consider much of the ICO market to be “actually fraud,” in Lubin’s words. While many ICOs do support some excellent quality projects, a lot of ICOs aren’t really used to support much of anything.

I admit, I have a lack of trust in a coin that can’t be mined, which is odd because Ripple—one of the best around—can’t actually be mined. It speaks to a lack of support for the open market; when you can technically produce more, that means the only way to get more isn’t just to buy them. While buying them does seem to be the fastest and probably most cost-effective way—have you seen the prices on bitcoin miners these days—being able to produce your own does speak to a more open overall market.

Cryptocurrency has its winners, its losers, and probably its outright frauds too. So let this be a lesson to everyone out there; not every ICO will turn into bitcoin.