You know, some stories are so absurd that they really don’t need much in the way of “explaining.”
Indeed, in cases where the punchline is obvious, where the intent to mislead admits of no ambiguity, and where there is simply no nuance to be had, editorializing risks watering things down and/or distracting people from grasping a point that is painfully obvious.
So we’re just going to say one quick thing, excerpt a few passages from a new Bloomberg piece and leave it at that in the interest of ensuring readers don’t get bogged down.
Lots of folks think cryptocurrencies are probably a fraud. And when people are committing, benefiting from, or otherwise participating in frauds, they do sh*t that is fraud-ish. Here’s a tweet from Monaco dated May 17:
And here’s a screengrab from a press release issued about a week later:
But here’s the thing: as Bloomberg notes on Monday “Monaco didn’t have a deal with Visa.”
See why that’s a problem? Here’s Bloomberg one more time:
Monaco is, however, working with a Visa-licensed issuer, Wirecard AG. As far as Visa goes, Monaco is being vetted through the credit-card issuer’s review process, according to spokeswoman Lea Cademenos.
Cademenos didn’t say how Monaco’s decision to promote two nonexistent relationships with Visa would affect the review process. Wirecard didn’t return requests for comment.
The tweet and the subsequent PR sent Monaco surging some 700%:
Then, on August 31, they unveiled an app and the press release that accompanied the unveiling had no mention of Visa. Monaco fell 29%.
Here’s Kris Marszalek, Monaco’s chief executive officer, to explain:
In retrospect, we probably wouldn’t put the Visa name on there yet. It probably would have been more prudent to just leave it out until everything is done.
Nothing further.
