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Ask HN: Where did all the ICOs go?
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?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tablespoon 4y agoBecause they were mostly scams and people (and regulators) got wise?
- PaulHoule 4y agoWhen 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.
- badrequest 4y agoWhat's the hot ICO going around in these circles right now that I'm just not aware of?
- PaulHoule 4y agoSee https://icodrops.com/ https://icodrops.com/
- humanistbot 4y agoThey were all scams, pump and dump.
- rvz 4y agoNo different to all the SPAC exit scams and bullshit reverse mergers that ended with many of these stocks dropping over 90% down after the hype.
- TinyRick 4y ago> some breakthrough technology Turns out few, if any, had any breakthrough or worthwhile technology
- nathias 4y agothere 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
- mschuster91 4y ago> How have they dissapeared so fast? 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.
- timy2shoes 4y agoThe 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.
- simple-thoughts 4y agoThe 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.
- pwinnski 4y agoDon'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.
- faefox 4y agoThey 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?
- ignoramous 4y agoSome pivoted to AI.
- insane_dreamer 4y agoSo, moving from one scam to another
- theboywho 4y agoThat’s like asking where did all the Kickstarters go. The answer is it depends, some are now successful businesses/projects, some didn’t make it.
- petesergeant 4y agoWhich ICOs turned into successful businesses or projects?
- Kranar 4y agoBrave the web browser. Filecoin for data storage. Augur the decentralized prediction platform. Numerai the hedge fund.
- jeremyjh 4y agoBut which ones were successful?
- robopsychology 4y agoEthereum?
- pavlov 4y agoWhat does the Brave token do? How many of the browser’s users actually interact with the token? Was the ICO necessary for Brave in any way? Genuinely asking because it’s the only one of these which could be familiar to someone who’s not deeply into crypto.
- 0xbadc0de5 4y agoYou "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.
- pinecoin 4y agoOur Initial Cone Offering in 2018 was a roaring success. Our Clean NFTs in 2021 didn't really catch on though. https://pinecoin.me https://pinecoin.me
- whalesalad 4y agoIn 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.
- hammyhavoc 4y agoWe didn't have anything like that at high school. What kind of gifts did other people bring?
- whalesalad 4y agoI think the ceiling was $20.
- kerblang 4y agoJust 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 - Well played.
- Analemma_ 4y ago> some breakthrough technology Citation needed.
- andrewmutz 4y agoWhile most of HN is skeptical of crypto (as I am), there are some crypto fans that hang out on this website. I would love to hear from a crypto fan, which was the most successful ICO? And where is it today?
- keiferski 4y agoNot sure I'd consider myself a "crypto fan", whatever that implies. The technology is interesting though, for sure. Quite a few legitimate organizations raised money via ICOs. The most notable being Brave and Ethereum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_coin_offering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_coin_offering
- mjnaus 4y agoEthereum
- tarunupaday 4y agoI 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/ 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)
- rabf 4y agoEthereum 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.
- ur-whale 4y ago> which was the most successful ICO? https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BTC https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BTC
- malthaus 4y agoWhere most SPAC's went as well - away! good riddance It was painful to watch how many people you think should know better fall for the most basic schemes.
- steveBK123 4y agoThese sorts of things stop around the time people realize they can, in fact, go to jail for fraud again.
- miles 4y agoShh... please don't resurrect this leviathan...
- blibble 4y agoeveryone involved is now trying to push their LLM startup
- lkbm 4y agoLot 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.
- illiarian 4y ago> 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: - https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-... - https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle... For newer descriptions of how these systems fail, see Molly White: https://blog.mollywhite.net/is-web3-bullshit/ https://blog.mollywhite.net/is-web3-bullshit/ (and other essays and talks) Edit: There's also The Edited Latecomer's Guide To Crypto https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations/latecomers-guide-to-crypto/ https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations/latecomers-guide-to-c...
- simple-thoughts 4y agoThey 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.
- ur-whale 4y ago> Where did all the ICOs go? Where they belong. Crypto is an ecosystem, complete with full-on darwinism, where worthy things survive and failed experiments wither away. Meanwhile: BTCUSD @ 28.06k [1] https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BTCUSD/ https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BTCUSD/
- irvingprime 4y agoI 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.