Initiative Q

» see quahl.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Initiative Q was not a cryptocurrency, and it was unusually insistent about saying so. No blockchain and nothing decentralized. The plan was a new payment network with a new unit of account called Q, managed by an independent monetary committee that would behave roughly like a central bank. The company said it had no intention of dodging regulators.

The man behind it had a real record. Saar Wilf founded Fraud Sciences, a payment-security company that eBay bought for $169 million in January 2008, which is a serious credential in exactly the field he was now proposing to rebuild. Initiative Q Ltd was registered in Tel Aviv on 30 May 2018. An economist from the Cato Institute, Lawrence H. White, lent his name to the advisory board.

The hard part of any payment network is that it is worthless until everyone has it, and Initiative Q's answer to that was the whole personality of the thing. It gave the money away in advance. You joined by invitation and invited other people, and a pile of future Q was reserved in your name. The allocation shrank as the user count rose, so the earlier you arrived the bigger your imaginary pile. Each Q, the pitch went, should eventually be worth something like a US dollar.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the invite ~

Autumn 2018 is when it became unavoidable. By 8 November, Vox counted more than two million signups across 180 countries. Six days later O Globo put the figure above five million. The invites moved the way chain letters have always moved, through people who were not quite sure and forwarded it anyway, because the downside of being wrong was an email address and the upside was allegedly a few thousand dollars.

Where it landed is the interesting part. The Times of India reported at the end of November 2018 that India alone accounted for around 20 percent of registrations, with Brazil close behind among the leading countries. Turkey never showed up on anybody's list of major markets. This was a global pile-on that somehow routed around a country with a fairly online population, and the Q invite in my part of the internet stayed a curiosity rather than a wave.

~ the decline ~

The press had it worked out almost immediately. FT Alphaville's verdict on 26 October 2018 ran under the headline "an elementary pyramid scheme with grandiose ideas." Three days later news.com.au noted that whatever the intent, the marketing read as a pyramid scheme to anyone looking at it from outside. Digital Spy gave up honestly: "Is Initiative Q real or fake? Short answer, we have absolutely no idea."

Not everyone piled on. Brendan Markey-Towler, an economist at the University of Queensland, wrote in Stuff that it was not a scam and that the underlying idea about bootstrapping a payment network was worth taking seriously, while being clear that nobody was getting rich. He was right about the first part. The company never charged the people it recruited and never took a payment in, which is what kept it off the register with OneCoin and the rest.

~ the deletion ~

In November 2021 the site and the app posted the same message: new signups were paused, because ten million members and the rate they were growing at were not enough to launch a currency. The company said it was looking for a way forward that would be worth something to the people who had joined, and that if it could not find one it would delete all user data. By November 2022 the project was gone and the personal information of ten million people had been permanently erased, which was the one promise it kept. quahl.com, the domain it had renamed itself onto near the end, has been answering "Offline for Maintenance" ever since.

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