Bankera, a Crypto Firm That Raised €100M in an ICO, Has Used Investor Funds to Buy Property

Early in 2018, near the tail end of a major cryptocurrency boom, a Lithuanian start-up called Bankera announced that it had managed to raise over 100 million euros in just six months by selling its own digital coin.

The company said the funds would be used to fashion a “bank for the blockchain era” — a fully fledged retail and investment institution, holding and exchanging most cryptocurrencies and competing with existing banks “as an equal.”

More than 100,000 people had bought tokens in an “initial coin offering,” or ICO — a type of cryptocurrency fundraiser — and had started receiving weekly payments drawn from a share of the fees generated when others bought and sold the coin. Amid a wave of ICOs in 2017 and 2018, the Lithuanian token looked like a potentially lucrative investment.

But seven years after the ICO, the token has collapsed in value, leaving many investors disappointed, and the Bankera project still hasn't achieved one of its self-proclaimed core objectives: acquiring a European Union banking license.

Now, an investigation by OCCRP and its partner 15min has uncovered how the once-promising cryptocurrency project has funded loans benefitting the founders of the venture, with investors left without the promised returns.

Reporters found evidence that a portion of the funds raised in the ICO appears to have been funneled into a sprawling real estate portfolio — including a villa on the French Riviera and high-end property in Lithuania — via a bank thousands of miles away in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu.