How SAFT are your Cryptocurrency Tokens?

William Lau wipes the sweat off his brow, as the heat from Hong Kong’s noonday sun plasters his frayed white singlet to his bony back. Lau’s shoulder blades and subtle musculature betray a life of physical labor.

In this city of over 8 million people, Lau swims through the sea of humanity unnoticed, looking for disused card board boxes and aluminium cans for recycling.

Like so many other residents of Hong Kong, Lau is just another face. And in a city fueled by avarice, time is opportunity and for many, right now there is no opportunity to understand how the seventy-year-old Lau came to this predicament.

He’s simply one of thousands of Hong Kong’s “forgotten” residents.

But it wasn’t always that way.

About three years ago, Lau, who had made a living for over six decades selling newspapers and packets of tissue paper at the corner of New Street and Queen’s Road Central in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan district was told about a way that dozens of people were getting rich — it was called “ICO.”

Or initial coin offering.

An illiterate emigre from China’s neighboring Guangdong province, Lau had fled China to Hong Kong in search of a better life, eking out a meager existence on the means streets of the city.

After many years of manual labor, hauling goods at Hong Kong’s port before delivering newspapers to Hong Kong’s betting obsessed punters at Happy Valley (the city’s horse racing track), Lau finally saved up enough to start his own little stand selling newspapers and some other everyday items.

But unlike the newsstands in New York City, Lau’s newsstand was essentially two wooden desks, covered with the day’s latest financial and gossip news.

When one day in 2017, a regular at his newsstand told Lau about ICOs and how people were making a fortune off them.

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