The Wall Street Journal has reportedly launched its own digital coin, called WSJCoin and killed it almost immediately, says a report from Finance Magnates.
Interested investors did not even have time to access the coin. The WSJ reporter, who was given the task to explore the option of launching the coin, Steven Russolillo, did not manage to get the process going and the coin never saw the real world.
It is not very surprising that even the Wall Street Journal cannot manage to get a successful ICO out there. Digital coins and blockchain projects funded by ICOs fail every day, where some 30% of all ICOs that launch and get funded never realize manage to “get out there”.
The idea of the WSJCoin was reportedly born in Japan, where Mr. Russolillo met the famous “Virtual Currency Group”. Since Japan is one of the most pro-blockchain, pro-cryptocurrency countries in the world, Russolillo developed the idea of WSJCoin and even pitched the concept during several conferences.
Apparently, the project did not take off and the Coin was nipped in the bud. The WSJCoin was going to be a digital coin for the newspaper sector. According to Cointelegraph, around 150 Coins were issued in one conference in Hong Kong. The newspaper also reported:
“Russolillo teamed up with Japanese developer Makuto Takemiya to use Hyperledger’s Iroha blockchain as the basis for WSJ Coin.”
The WSJCoin project was stopped by Neil Lipschitz, who is an editor for ethics and standards at WSJ, citing that the newspaper is not in the business of creating digital coins, but rather, report important events to the world. For now, the WSJCoin has halted.