Spectiv VR was an ICO that happened in late 2017. Which was the perfect time to do a deal. There were problems surrounding this before the ICO even closed. Spectiv announced on their facebook page that a fake site Spectivvr.org was trying to scam people. If you held it until now, it wouldn’t have mattered much if you bought the real one or the scam. Either way you would have still lost all of your money.

The premise of the real Spectiv VR was to combine cryptocurrency with VR in a streaming service and sell ads and pay the VR industry professionals with tokens instead of cash. Seems legit. They raised about 9 million USD on their ICO. They also did a “White Label” offering and sold another 4,000 or 5,000 ethereum in August of 2018. Not sure how much this came out to because the prices were fluctuating a lot that month but maybe another 2 million. Not sure what exactly the total capital raised was but definitely north of 10 million USD. One user on the Bitcoin talk forum said that SpectivVR is a scam.

So where did all of this money go? Today the marketplace they were building is nowhere to be found. All of their websites are not resolving, and as far as we are aware of the new currency they started is now worthless.

So what were they trying to do. An early version of the plan sounded a little like this:

Signal Token Protocol

The Signal Token (SIG) Protocol is designed to decentralize the buying, selling, and rewarding of attention across media platforms by removing centralized intermediaries from advertising transactions.

Ad Campaign Smart Contracts

Using the Signal Token Protocol, an advertiser can use SIGs via a smart contract associated with target content. This content is now active, or “hot,” which means publishers, viewers, and curators can engage with that advertiser through the smart contract and be rewarded with SIGs for driving attention to that content.

Every ad view and click that occurs is communicated to the Ad Campaign Smart Contract through a third-party oracle. The Ad Campaign Smart Contract will then autonomously reward SIGs to the users participating in that engagement. By utilizing smart contracts, a publicly verifiable blockchain, and trusted oracles, this protocol can directly disintermediate the “trade” of attention.

Open-Source Protocol

The Spectiv Company developed the Signal Token Protocol specifically for use within Spectiv, but we understand that accurate attention data analytics are difficult to perfect. Additionally, we understand that for real-world advertisers to engage with SIGs, the protocol must accommodate more than just Spectiv content.

We have developed SIGs for any ad-driven media platform to use and build upon; video-based, audio-based, written, or mixed. In other words, the Signal Token utility is not fixed to Spectiv. Rather, it is built to be its own decentralized, autonomous protocol that can support multiple attention economies. Each media platform can integrate its own unique mechanisms for monitoring genuine attention data, contributing to the long-term effectiveness of the protocol.

Spectiv will act as the first adopter for this protocol, generating real-world application data to support future adoption by other media platforms.

A later version of the Signal Protocol showed up in 2019 with the following plan:

They were trying to setup a “signal market place”. There is a link above to their video pitch. It was supposed to work as follows:

Performance Based
Signal transactions only execute when a specified event triggers. An advertiser can implement a commission-style listing, where affiliate rewards are only disbursed when actual sales are made. This is essentially a “nothing to lose” campaign for the advertiser!

Competing Network
Advertisers compete for visibility based on their reward metrics. This means an advertiser who sets their offering to 5 SIG / click will have a higher place in the network than one who sets their offering to 2 SIG / click. Affiliates naturally compete for the most rewarding advertisers.

Affiliates compete for visibility based on their track record for driving engagement. This means an affiliate who has driven 1,000 sales will have a higher place in the network than an affiliate who has only driven 10 sales. Advertisers naturally compete for the most effective affiliates.

Peer-to-Peer
Since there is no centralized entity between participants in this ecosystem, it allows advertisers to have a closer connection with their influencers and vice versa. This often leads to more effective advertising and engagement. Additionally, it cuts out matchmaking fees so advertisers get more bang for their buck and influencers get more rewards for their effort.

Easy Integration
This advertising protocol inherently works within existing web frameworks, so it does not require permissions with major online platforms like Google, Facebook, etc. Once an affiliate has generated their unique link, they can seamlessly advertise across all online mediums and audiences.

Low Fees
Centralized entities like YouTube charge huge fees for connecting advertisers to influencers and administrating their transactions. The Signal Marketplace allows advertisers to connect with influencers directly, and all transactions are executed autonomously via smart contract – like a vending machine. This means much lower fees for advertisers and greater rewards for influencers.

The team consisted of the following people:

CO-FOUNDER, CEO
Dylan Senter
CO-FOUNDER, COO
Nick Ravanbakhsh
CHIEF OF TECHNOLOGY
Chris Peña
CONSULTING CFO
Mike Mackey
UI DEVELOPER
Ramon Hernandez
ETHEREUM DEVELOPER
Bryn Bellomy
SOFTWARE ARCHITECT
Justin Wood
UX DEVELOPER
Jasmine Nguyen
WEB DEVELOPER
Jin Chung
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Mirza Baig
GROWTH HACKER
Ildefonso Prieto

Here was the CEO’s bio from their old website:

Dylan Senter
Co-Founder & CEO
Dylan is an accomplished entrepreneur who has founded multiple businesses over the past several years. He is currently a co-founder with Sensytec, a smart materials technology startup that has received over $3M in R&D funding to date. He is also an experienced e-commerce expert, operating his own Amazon storefront (SuperSenter) that generated >$500,000 in sales for 2016. His entrepreneurial achievements earned him honors and scholarship from the Texas Business Hall of Fame in 2015. His specialties are in business development, marketing, and growth strategies.

They put together an advisory board that looked impressive:

Sheldon Weisfeld
FOUNDER OF COINVAULT ATM
Adam Richard
DIRECTOR – SUTTON STONE
James Duchenne
DIRECTOR – SUTTON STONE
Marshall Long
CTO – FINAL HASH
CEO – MOCKIT ESPORTS
Mo Kumarsi
BLOCKCHAIN EVANGELIST
Michael Terpin
CEO TRANSFORM GROUP

It seems like the name they wanted to really point out as a key adviser is Mo Kumarsi. Here was the Bio that they put up for him:

Mo Kumarsi
Blockchain Evangelist
Mo is an entrepreneur, Bitcoin and Ethereum investor and trader, blockchain evangelist and marketing expert. He has over 15 years of startup and business development experience and he currently provides consultation for multiple blockchain projects. Mr. Kumarsi is fully dedicated to growth and human excellence, and throughout 2017 he directed the management of business lead generation, marketing and long-term relationship building for multiple ICOs. Mr. Kumarsi has served as a professional business consultant prior to the early adoption of blockchain technology in other early stage startups.

The plan kind of went like this:

Here is an interview with the COO at one of the early stages after their ICO.

It was supposed to be an advertising based platform which has always been a rough business. They faced a triple head wind, first was that the VR marketplace only represented a small percentage of gamers, Second that to make an advertising business you need huge scale, and third that they needed to convince their streamers and developers to take their ERC-20 token (signal token) instead of actual cash.

I am not sure where things went wrong. But we cant find the marketplace or any of their websites. And it looks like the investors funds may also be Kaput!