The Era of ICO’s

While the cryptocurrency market is exciting, it remains a very mysterious place for the majority of people. While many specialists remain sceptical about the future of cryptocurrencies, there are an increasing number of people investing heavily, with the hopes of getting rich quick.

This topic quickly gained attention last year, to the point where it’s hard to ignore. Thomas Frey, futurist and author, declared with a strong belief that “cryptocurrency is very much here to stay, and by 2030, cryptocurrencies are going to displace around 25% of all national currencies”.[⁵]Although cryptocurrencies should not be regarded as a “get rich quick scheme”, it’s still possible to earn vast riches if you know your strategies.

Despite established currencies, new ICO’s are being released monthly. You could look at the ICO as a new way of bringing solutions into almost any industry, with blockchain technology. The year 2017 was truly unbelievable as ICO’s were able to raise an approximate of $5b dollars, not considering the fact that only 48% of projects were successful. ²

ICO’s in 2107

ICO’s are a simple way to crowdfund your project. The bad thing is that its unregulated and not everyone has good intentions. You can create an ICO without the need of an existing company, a client base, without the need of a MVP (minimum viable product), etc. All this lead to a lot of people creating blockchain ideas, being a “hot topic”, in order to get rich quick, with no regulatory rules to stop them.¹

UET, or Useless Ethereum Token, was a mind blowing ICO due to the fact that it didn’t have anything behind it, nothing at all. On the website it clearly said “You’re going to give some random person on the internet money, and they’re going to take it and go buy stuff with it. Seriously don’t buy these tokens”, still people were sending money in. In fact, the person behind this project raised 310 Ethereum (ETH), which at today’s price equals to $280,000.¹

More serious projects, with good intentions, raised the bar. They started hiring people straight away from the Wall Street, including bankers, lawyers, advisors, etc. Trade.io is a very good example, as it is led by a Wall Street veteran Jim Preissler (investment banking specialist), which on boarded a Chinese American billionaire, Chine Lee. ICO teams are now willing to invest significant money in their people/team, and to attract the best talents in the world. As half of them cannot actually afford them, ICO’s pay large sums of tokens, which is similar to the first internet companies.¹

The world has seen successful ICO’s which raised a “ton” of money. An example of a good ICO is the Brave browser. This project raised an amazing $35 million in 30 seconds.³ Simply amazing! Other top ICOs worth mentioning are Filecoin, Tezos, EOS, Bancor, etc. Despite all of this, Pavel Durov and his Telegram ICO is about to raise an incredible $1.6b. He has already successfully gained $850m from private investors in round one. The second round of the pre-sale was already announced.Scepticism is clear right now as many regulations and restrictions were announced from countries such as China, Japan, etc. Despite that, a lot of people have a strong belief and hope that 2018 will be the year in which cryptocurrencies, and especially ICO’s, will gain traction and hit new highs.

Find.Exchange

Author: Andrei G. at Find.Exchange

[¹]:https://www.forbes.com/sites/outofasia/2017/12/18/icos-in-2017-from-two-geeks-and-a-whitepaper-to-professional-fundraising-machines/#6820de4139ea[²]:http://uk.businessinsider.com/how-much-raised-icos-2017-tokendata-2017-2018-1[³]:https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/brave-ico-35-million-30-seconds-brendan-eich/[⁴]:https://hackernoon.com/2017-a-year-in-review-initial-coin-offerings-91ec1c7367a5[⁵]http://bitcoinist.com/will-cryptocurrency-replace-national-currencies-by-2030/

The Era of ICO’s was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.