Are ICO putting pressure on Ethereum?
An ICO is a recently emerged concept of crowdfunding Blockchain projects.
Its an event in which a company issues its own cryptocurrency and sells a number of these tokens to irs intended audience.
Initial Coins Offering (ICO) can last for a few days to a few months or even an entire year as in the EOS case.
Once the ICO is complete, contributors can then use these tokens, hold them or even sell them to make a profit.
Ethereum made it relatively easy for developers to build complex Smart Contracts and Decentralized Autonomous Apps (DApps).
As Ethereum's price rose, it became the platform of choice for these ICOs.
If an ICO becomes incredibly popular, the Ethereum network may be crowded which makes the ICO run less smoothly but can also interfere with other users of the Ethereum Network.
In the case of the Bancor Token Sale:
- The strong hype around Bancor led to a significant increase in pending transactions, as buyers attempted to acquire BNTs. Consequently, the whole Ethereum network was impacted for many hours from such a rush
- Pending transactions end up in a dedicated memory space on the network’s nodes, which is more commonly called “backlog” or “transaction pool.” When this space is saturated, transactions take greater amounts of time to be validated
- The Bancor team tried to modify the smart contract to stop the token sale at 250,000 ETH, but even they couldn't do it because of the congestion. This led to the ICO lasting two hours more than initially planned
Long term solutions have not yet been found. Nevertheless, certain ICOs as iDice decided to tell users to increase the "gas they use to propel their investments.
You still have other platforms to make ICO:
- Ethereum Classic proposed a similar platform to Ethereum's one
- Waves platforms works differently, but allows mostly the same functionality
- Raiden Network, a new Ethereum implementation could add an extra layer and increase transaction throughput
ICO Calendar for the coming weeks
| Name | Start | End | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BlockCat | Jul,15 2017 | Aug 18, 2017 | ||
| QVolta | Aug 15,2017 | Aug 20, 2017 | ||
| Dmarket | Aug 17,2017 | Aug 20, 2017 | ||
| PAquarium | Jul 22,2017 | Aug 25, 2017 | ||
| Decentraland | Aug 17,2017 | Aug 26, 2017 | ||
| DIMCOIN | Jul 01,2017 | Aug 27, 2017 | ||
| Ai Coin | Jul 17,2017 | Aug 28, 2017 | ||
| Everex | Jul 24,2017 | Aug 31, 2017 |
Sources:
The ICO mania and its consequences on Ethereum
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