At CCN we have been following the Kodak story – a once monolithic print photography company that has struggled to adapt to the digital world. The announcement that the brand was turning to blockchain with KODAKCoin, which aims to protect photographers’ digital rights utilizing immutable distributed ledger technology, swept through the crypto space. Despite the ICO’s early wobbles, when the coin finally launched it tripled from its ICO price, leaving initial investors pleased and observers optimistic regarding the company’s transformed future.However, investment research firm Kerrisdale Capital this week has released a crippling 22-page indictment on the project.
Referring to the company as a “dying relic of American manufacturing”, (KODAK went bankrupt in 2013), Kerrisdale sees the $300m ICO as a cash grab that “will never deliver promised benefits”.
Their report is damning, stating that whilst:“blockchain and cryptocurrencies are exciting technologies with the potential to disrupt many industries; their use in media rights licensing by KODAKOne will not be one of them”.
They go on to describe the project as a “moribund company’s hollow attempt to chase the ICO craze” and the team as having “zero credibility”.
Investors were further warned that the cryptotoken is in their eyes of no value, stating:
“We view the equity as worthless, implying downside of -100%.”
In Black and White
The central criticism is that the project uses buzzwords such as “AI-enabled image recognition” and “encrypted digital ledger” to generate hype and “speculative mania”, obscuring the reality that the project cannot achieve it’s stated goals. According to the firm, “cryptographic hashing will not prove the provenance of IP and using blockchain does not diminish the resources necessary for infringement detection and enforcement”.
In other words, the project won’t be able to protect photographers any more than they currently are, and that “there is no practical advantage to using blockchain”…
Read Full: ‘Worthless’: Research Firm Levels Kodak ICO With Withering Indictment
