Back before Cronos, and Crypto.com Coin, there was Monaco an ERC-20 token - offered by the company that later rebranded itself to Crypto.com. Had you invested in this crypto.com prototype in 2018 you'd be down ~87% - Even after accounting for the later sw

If you're relatively new to Crypto, you might not know about Monaco, the company that is now Crypto.com. Monaco launched in May, 2017 with ambitions plans for Crypto onboarding, similar to what you see at Crypto.com today with their tiered crypto credit cards.

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On Jan. 1st 2018 Monaco was ~$15 but a bear market and the lack of a time table for the the hyped tiered crypto cashback debit card, took a huge toll on this project.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180101045117/https://coinmarketcap.com/

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In 2020 Crypto.com decided to completely remove Monaco utility from their platform in favor of the crypto.com Coin and allowed users to swap this prototype ERC-20 token for CRO. In a now deleted blog post, you can see that it was advertised as roughly 1 Monaco to 28 CRO.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200927064258/https://blog.crypto.com/important-announcement-mco-swap/

This means for every one Monaco you bought in 2018 for $15 you'd have ~28 CRO today, currently worth $1.96 and your investment would be down ~87% since Jan. 2018.

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In Jan. 2018, if you weren't chasing Alts - you could have bought

• BTC = $13,842
• ETH = $761

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If you want to find out more about Monaco you can check out this Reddit post from early 2019 that outlines the history of the project up to that time.

Monaco (MCO) Raised $26 Million in ICO and Promised to Deliver Crypto Visa Cards, Rebrands Itself to Crypto.com and Then Crypto.com Chain (CRO) After Failing to Deliver Cards

To sum up this long tale, Monaco (MCO) raised tens of millions of dollars to launch a cryptocurrency Visa card that never materialized. Vast amounts of user identification information were collected in the process — is still being collected to this day despite no time table for the launch of the Visa cards. The company rebranded itself by buying the $12 million Crypto.com website and renamed Monaco (MCO) to Crypto.com, likely due to numerous users calling Monaco (MCO) a scam.