I remember back in 2017 or 2016 there were posts left and right someone doing an ICO with some breakthrough technology. How have they dissapeared so fast? And why is nobody doing ICOs right now? Were any of the startups that did that successful?
The SEC determined that since ICOs trivially satisfy the Howey Test, ICOs are securities and must follow security regulations. Of course, if anyone were to follow security regulations and have a legitimate offering they would just do an IPO.
The problem with the “SEC shutdown ICO” theory is US citizens are not the majority of crypto users. ICOs did ban US citizens and the ones active today usually still do so. Most of the world did not enforce anti ICO regulations so the cause must be elsewhere - and we have obvious candidates with defi.
Don't get me wrong, there is a great big world outside the US, but for a lot of things, the US is the market that matters. It's where the loose money is, and US tax law reaches around the world to US citizens everywhere.
They were superseded by defi and especially decentralized exchanges.
In the ICO era, the only way to get a coin tradeable was to get it listed on centralized exchanges. Once uniswap and other dex launched, it became much easier to launch a new token. Now you only needed assets for liquidity and did not need to raise funds for marketing and listing.
Defi farming took it even further by paying users tokens for providing dex liquidity, this additional step meant that a project of interest to users did not even need to acquire assets directly for liquidity but instead could rely on its userbase.
Defi 2.0 tech took this further by solving the primary issue of defi which was runs on liquidity. The key term is “POL” that is Protocol owned liquidity. Many experiments failed but today most tokens that successfully launch and are more than a flash in the pan use some variant of POL.
Just want to point out that this HN account has been in place since 2018, but hasn't commented in more than four years - waiting, waiting, waiting for the right moment... and then -
In high school we had a gift exchange one year... I procrastinated of course and waited to the very last minute to find a gift. The night before the exchange, I found a pine cone in my backyard and spray painted it gold. Got a few laughs but ultimately I felt kinda bad about bringing such a terrible gift.
Lot of commenters saying they're all scam pump-and-dumps, but I suspect a lot had something to them that the builders believed to be of value.
As best I can tell, the value props were 90%+ "more efficient crypto", "more decentralized crypto", "more private crypto". I think Compound had a different mechanism for rewarding validators, but even that's just fiddling with the finances of the network.
I want novel use-cases outside of just finance. There was a layman's NFT video suggesting they'd work as a way of doing concert tickets, and there's FileCoin for distributed storage.
I tried asking Bard for more, and didn't get much, but ChatGPT-4 gave me a bunch: Golem ("decentralized supercomputer by allowing users to rent out their idle computing power to others"), Basic Attention Token (Brave's thing for fixing ads/micro-transactions, Chainlink ("decentralized oracle network that allows smart contracts to access data from external sources"), Siacoin ("Users can rent out their unused hard drive space to store encrypted files for others, in exchange for Siacoin"), Augur ("decentralized prediction market platform"), and Decentraland ("users can create, experience, and monetize content and applications"???)
Don't get me wrong, it makes sense that cryptocurrency's use-cases are mostly financial, but there was a lot of energy, much of it honest in this space. I'd love to see a readable, not-super-technical blog post that lays out the ideas people came up with (and which, if any, panned out), rather than just the thousand's "it's all a scam" dismissal. Golem and Filecoin/Siacoin both sound like they might actually solve real problems / create rel value.
> I want novel use-cases outside of just finance. There was a layman's NFT video suggesting they'd work as a way of doing concert tickets
Most of those "novel ways" either make no sense or make trivial things hard and hard things nearly impossible. Most people peddling (there's no other word for it) these solutions have no idea how the real world works, or what the real world needs.
> I'd love to see a readable, not-super-technical blog post that lays out the ideas people came up with (and which, if any, panned out)
6 years ago these two articles already described how many "novel ways" make no sense, no matter the intention. All the issues described remain, regardless of how many new buzzwords people come up with in the crypto space:
People really need to stop listening to molly white, her skepticism is fundamentally no different from what crypto shillers do. It’s toxic and exploits people’s ignorance about legitimate and balanced routes to crypto education. Only the sign is inverted.
For NFTs it’s very easy to grasp their novel use case. Any digital asset (content subscriptions, software licences, passes to gated communities, in-game items etc. — all are supported by real, functional examples today) can be distributed easily to the wallet of your users and you don’t need to worry about building additional middleman infrastructure to store and verify the data or to enable your users to trade the assets. In fact the users gain unprecedented property rights: they can sell the assets freely, take a peer-to-peer currency loan against them, exchange them for something else, destroy them etc. As the creator of the NFT collection you don’t need to worry about how that happens because it takes place on decentralised protocols that are already operational.
When I look at blockhead forums I think the blockheads have not given up and they are still minting and trading NFTs, ICOs and stuff, prices and volumes aren’t down that far from the peak, but the rest of the world has lost interest.
I talked to some startup CEOs back in those days and was amazed at how naïve they were about the implications of what they were doing. They tended to believe that
a) Having cool technology was enough to get rich;
b) An ICO was a quick way to raise big money without government "interference" because the tech was so new that it was not covered under existing laws or regulations;
c) They didn't really need a great product, they just needed to make it look good until being acquired.
I also noticed that when I told them their assumptions were faulty, they stopped paying any attention.
It seems likely that most of these people are now either in jail, or working (unless recently laid off) as marketing flaks at some tech company other than their own.
The lessons have, for some of us, been hard learned. But people do learn.
They were merely the scam du jour until regulators caught up with them. The space has mostly moved on to NFTs though even those have lost their luster at this point. Who knows what's next?
You "earn" BAT by accepting ads via notification. You can then donate this to other sites/creators (at least in theory). I tried it and managed about $25 USD of BAT over the course of a year. The catch is that it's impossible to convert to anything useful. So it's basically just vaporware. I have since stopped that experiment.
It has inbuilt clients that connect to Tor, IPFS and an ad blocker that can generate a small amount of income just for browsing the web. Their token is used to pay users for receiving adverts. ICO probably wasn't necessary but at the time it was a good way of both marketing and raising money.
Looks like the Brave BAT token trades at 0.29 USD, roughly the same price as five years ago. That seems like a good performance for a 2017 ICO since most of them went to zero.
I wonder how the secondary market works. It’s convenient for Brave to pay you in BAT for watching ads. Then you probably want to convert those BAT earnings to money since this is a token with no obvious reason to appreciate (as the price history shows). Who’s buying ad-earned BAT at 29 cents and why? Does Brave pay for market-making?
The people advertising buy BAT back from the users so they can continue advertising. As ads get served, BAT gets transferred from the advertiser to the user. The user then sells their BAT on an exchange, and advertisers buy it so they can continue advertising.
The most interesting thing about Brave Token is that they can distribute money without knowing bank details. They give you Brave tokens, you cash out through Coinbase. Coinbase needs your identity/bank routing details, but Brave does not.
Someone needs to buy the BAT tokens on Coinbase. Who does that? There doesn’t seem to be an obvious reason for anyone to hold this token.
Is it Brave themselves buying the tokens or paying a market maker? That would complete the loop you describe where the token is simply a way for them to pay semi-anonymously.
The loop is that advertisers acquire BAT (typically by purchasing it for cash from an exchange like Coinbase). That BAT is then distributed to people who view the advertisements, who then sell it back to the advertisers for cash.
Brave does not buy the token or pay any market maker, it's a simple cycle between advertisers and viewers.
A combination of most being rug pulls and scams, some of their inventors and advertisers getting into trouble with the law, and the Fed turning off the free money spigot as a consequence of the Ukraine war.
> And why is nobody doing ICOs right now?
IIRC, that one is because securities regulators have caught up with reality and threaten to bring the hammer down on people thinking they can escape securities laws by "technicialities".
> Were any of the startups that did that successful?
Not that I'm aware of. The only successes were had by early investors dumping their shares onto gullible bag holders.
Brave shipped a descent product. There's plenty of "ICOs" that contributed to open source protocols or standards on Ethereum, but yeah, it's the minority. I don't think most companies during the dot com com contributed anything either, nor will all these AI startups raising absurd amounts of money for hallucinating your next road trip.
I do not know which one was/is the most successful.
In terms of real-world use cases - I am familiar with and excited about WindingTree. https://windingtree.com/
They are building a platform to make the distribution of travel products (hotel rooms, flights and more) - arguably digital tokens with real-world value - more inclusive.
They did an ICO with a token called LIF that I bought at that time (not to dump later, but because I could identify with the problem and wanted to support them)
Ethereum is probably the most successful ICO. Out of the ICO's which have launched much like startups less than 10% survive and yes many were also scams. Some examples of succesful ones though are MakerDAO and Synthetix. Both have successful running products which generate large amounts of fees.
It is more common now for a project to distribute tokens after it has a running product to incentivise early users and integraters. ICO's still happen but are oftne restricted to venture capitalists and registered investors.
there are still ICOs, but aren't as popular, that was more the state of the crypto in 2016 with the arrival of tokens, now tokens are old news but there are other kinds of projects mostly in DeFi
