Initial Coin Offering, Token Sale or Coin sales (“ICO”) is an innovative new way of raising capital for project based ventures. Hong Kong is becoming a strong ICO hub due to its regulatory systems, business friendly tax system, robust corporate services industry and its proximity to the Chinese cryptocurrency market. L & Y was one of the law firms advising the very first public ICO in Hong Kong on a wide variety of issues including regulatory advisory (e.g. whether the token sale would be considered as a collective investment scheme (CIS), marketing, strategy and technology advisory). L & Y works closely with the client’s team to ensure all aspects of the ICO are catered for in a diligent manner. We believe that our passion for innovation motivates us to deliver considerable added value for our clients and their ICO projects. We have advised on Project SONM’s ICO, an ICO that have successfully raised a total of US$42million for the development of a secure and cost-effective fog supercomputer designed for general-purpose computing whereby miners all over the world can leverage their idle computer power to become part of the SONM network, replacing the traditional centralized cloud services and providing a platform for rental of computer processing power through the fog. We have also advised Formosa Financial (FMF) on its ICO, which successfully raised approximately US$23million in May 2018 for the purpose of developing a blockchain based banking system that could offer a more secured, cost effective and efficient system to replace the traditional banking industry. FMF aims to offer one of the first fully-licensed crypto-bank that provides services in crypto-security, treasury management (which includes lending services) and payment services.