What Are ICOs?
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Across the social media landscape known for its controversial, wild and slightly prejudicial atmosphere, cryptocurrency and the people who make it a religious conversion effort to the ordinary man stands out like that red hair child (no schism as red hairs) in a family of black hair. We are a weird and persistent bunch. There is fire in the belly when someone oppose our view of the best cryptocurrency on the market. We resort to memes to ease that tension when we have not so good day (Shibes, Chickun and Pepe followers- I am looking at you).
Anyways, for today, we chat about ICOs. Those one time coin offers that sometimes can mean the difference between striking it rich or going broke. But what are ICOs (or what some people call 10x, 100x, 1000x, lambo-maker or I-Cos).
Now, to illustrate, Free Incorporated (not an actually company) who already has a product, wants to join the big boys like Facebook, Google and Alphabet. In order to attain this acme of success, Free Inc had to get on an exchange. Before doing so they must attract people to their venture through the use of selling a share (a form of security) of their company. This is called an Initial Public Offering.
Although it has the word , "public", it does not mean everyone can buy a share of the company. The investor had to meet a particular criteria and skill set (mostly financial) to be eligible to purchase at least one of these shares. So usually, the ordinary 9-5 guy cannot participate in this occasion although at this time, each shares are phenomenally cheap.
Therefore, the rich investor will get richer when Free Inc. hits the exchanges.
Consequently, ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) or token sales came to being in 2013 when the overall cryptocurrency market cap was sitting comfortably over a billion dollars. Initial Coin Offerings are similar to Initial Public Offerings. The only difference between both of them is that ICOs are for the public investor (which includes everyone and anyone who has sufficient capital and does not have to meet any other qualifications) which makes this form of security unregulated.
During those early days of cryptocurrencies or what we called Pre-Mount Gox (2009-2013), each coins relied on their products to attract investors instead of a crowdfund. If there was no physical object or services, back in that period, ventures would immediately die. Then came the first cryptocurrency to use ICO to fund their project, that was, Mastercoin (now the cryptocurrency, Omni).
Mastercoin's Logo
According to a blog from the Omni foundation, Mastercoin was made public due to the idea of the Second Bitcoin Whitepaper by J.R. Willett (the guy pictured below) which implied that the existing Bitcoin Network could be used to form layers of higher level protocols (like what smart contracts are to Ethereum) just to create new rules to follow which spur the creation and development of new cryptocurrencies. This idea did not involve changing the protocol of bitcoin itself (Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash) or required the creation of an another new blockchain infrastructure (Peercoin and Lisk) to handle these rules. So basically Mastercoin was the first cryptocurrency to use smart contracts, not Ethereum although most ICOs nowadays operate on Eth's blockchain. By the way, Ethereum had its token sale the following year and have raised 3700 BTC (2.3 million dollars at the time) in half a day! And that was the beginning period for ICOs.
Due to several hacks from exchanges, bad ecosystems, discord between developers over protocols and the bitter aftertaste of Silk Road, ICOs did not get much backings in the years to follow, that is, until 2017. As shown below in the video, ICOs exploded in popularity up to November of last year.
Just to tell of how huge this was: The token sale for a new web browser called Brave generated about $35 million in under 30 seconds in May. Kik's ICO for its product Kin raised close to $100 million. As of November last year, there was on average 50 ICOs per month with Filecoin's raising the highest at $257 million. In all, ICOs have raked in over five billion dollars last year. By July, 2017, more than 20 websites were created to keep track of ICOs.
Below is a list of links to some of the sites where one can find these token sales and ICOs.
➠ ICO alert
➠ Coinlauncher
➠ ICO-List
➠ Top ICO List
➠ List ICO
➠ Coin schedule
➠ ICO watchlist
➠ Token Tops
➠ Crypto Potato
➠ Coingecko
➠ Cryptocompare
➠ Cryptocoincharts
➠ Tokenmarket
➠ ICO bench
Despite the mass hysteria over these ventures, over half of them are not legit or does not entice the investor to put buy up their tokens. As a result, some ICOs failed, never to see the light of day again while some unexpectedly became massive in under three months. This is a reason I keep adding that disclaimer at the top of my posts for you to DYOR and invest your gambling money because these programs are speculations and they can be fraud in the blink of an eye. Hence invest in whatever ICO, you think will be very attractive to regular people and has a strong team. Last but not least, pray to whatever god you worship for them to not do a stage left.
I hope you guys are having a lovely day. Do not let the markets get you down. Remember that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. FUDs are like scratches. They hurt now but tomorrow they will be insignificant. Subscribe for content like this and much more. Buy your ticket to the Moon Express and always be fantastical.
Later.
Source:
➧ J.R. Willett's bio
➧ What is an ICO?
➧ IPO
➧ Four years of ICO activity video
➧ Pictures Courtesy of Pexels, Google Images and Pixabay.
