Initial Coin Offerings

“The data shows that there was about 20,000 people who bought in the ICO.”

“You don't need your own chain. You don't need to have an ICO. You don't need to distribute tokens to people because they've performed some action in your system. You don't need any of that. You can have a profitable business in the blockchain industry. That's …”

“Really we decided to just put our fundraising plans on hold completely until we seen what the SEC was going to allow.”

“Now it's like so many more rules and regulations around it to the point where it feels almost identical to a tradition around, and I can speak from direct experience.”

“We are launching an ICO and I'm pitching for the first time in Dubai. I'm, we're shooting for thirty million and that's why I didn't raise a lot of money.”

“We didn't invest in one ICO.”

“The first time anything happens in the crypto world, it's like a money grab and then there's a crash. And then people start to think about what it could actually be used for. And while that's being built, people are already moving on to the next money grab, ri…”

“I do think 99% of the ICOs in crypto projects have never materialized into anything reasonable. And I think a significant portion of them have been built by either grifters, incompetent people, or some combination of both.”

“One of the things that was really profound about ICOs was it was a completely open and democratic model to invest in technology.”

“I don't know, because we had, I think, lots of dependency on ICO back in the day, and it was kind of a little bit of unstable, I think. So we didn't get a very good multiplicator, to be honest.”

“Actually, no, I think it was the Gnosis ICO, which was in like May fifth or May 10th or something of 2017, but it was in early May. And that was at that point, probably a 10th legit ICO. At that point, I remember I was tagging with Tushar, and they brought twe…”

“Every ICO, every NFT and the art market, right? These are examples of unproductive assets.”

“Well, so, I mean, to be really clear, we'll never do an ICO, right? We're never going to sell tokens to the public. We, the only way you can get our token is to earn it, is to help us build the network, right?”

“I put permission blockchains as being more decentralized than these so-called ICOs we're seeing, or initial coin offerings. Because quite frankly, if you can do an initial coin offering, if you can raise money, that means that there's an organization behind wh…”

“And I think what you were saying about ICOs is a lot of sort of masquerading is that there are obviously people taking advantage of With the, you know, just the money flowing in, and sort of taking what is probably just a normal company that's not a protocol, …”

“My sense was that the ICOs had slowed down quite a bit, but there were still four hundred million in token sales in November alone.”

“You know, we hear so much about the ICO boom, but in terms of, kind of, like, total value created this year, there's actually been way more value created by forks than ICOs.”

“There's been so much attention on ICOs that, by the way, you don't need an ICO. Bitcoin never had an ICO. Ethereum had a very, relatively speaking, small one, eighteen million. And I don't think that was a key part of the network success.”

“And I actually think if you focus too much on the ICO or the, you know, the token sale, it can actually really hurt your community.”

“I think that despite ICOs right now being very noisy, sort of scammy and all these things, it has created an inflection point where when you have a brilliant idea, the capital is much more readily available from a large group of people that actually conceptual…”

“With ICOs, I think that it's probably the fastest and most efficient capital coordination we've ever seen in capitalism, like, since money was invented.”

“Just like startups, there's a small percentage that are legit and really worth funding. And there's a whole glut of projects that unfortunately are not and probably won't go anywhere.”

“It was, what, seven billion dollars in ISEA initial coin offerings. And my number might be outdated because, you know, the year's gone on since I looked. But it's something like seven, eight billion dollars already this year alone.”

“Well, much like Secret Service, they can't do every case, number one, so a lot of those scams are gonna get a pass, but number two, I predict we are gonna see a lot of enforcement actions against fraudulent, scammy ICOs, and good because they bring down the na…”

“One of the things we saw is that as we moved through 2017, the projects got better at capturing more of that value. So we weren't seeing as large of sort of the pop On day one of trading.”

“Initially, everybody was ignoring securities laws entirely, and then there was this idea, like, oh, maybe we need to comply with these things, and so then there were all these other mechanisms, like the SAFT that were invented, and so I'd say that was the othe…”

“I look at ICOs strictly defined as people raising large crowdfunding rounds from relatively technically unsophisticated investors as a symptom, which is that there are a lot of scammers who are taking advantage of this ecosystem. And I think those bad actors c…”

“You know, for them, the SaaS business is probably the only way a software model is going to work, but it's going to transform itself into the ICO model, which is the blockchain, because it's the logical progression, you know, internet, one point O internet, tw…”

“And not every one of these projects necessarily needs its own token. Some of these projects could be just sort of core infrastructure at the base layer of the protocol but there's not an incentive or there's at least no mechanism by which the community can for…”

“But there's a world in which, okay, you know, there have been ICOs where on day one the folks involved made say tens of millions or more of dollars and they hadn't even shipped a product.”

“Well, I, I've said publicly, there's never going to be a lightning ICO.”

“There can be perverse incentives because now there's so much money and they're not actually able to ship a product.”

“I think we've seen ICOs or ICO fever really diminish as the year has gone by. I think we're getting to a healthier place, and largely due to the increased interest from regulators in the space. I think that's been very positive.”

“Now, even these days, you know, exchanges are offering capital for ICOs.”

“If you want to go with a bank, like for example, Silicon Valley bank, you know, you need to go through six months of compliance in order to do an ICO.”

“We are looking into it very actively. But you know, it all depends.”

“They certainly have had a lot of financial interest in the ICO, and will probably raise up to two billion or so.”

“Telegram's ICO alone actually raised 1.7 billion dollars.”

“I think private, privacy tokens are actually a thing. Like if you talk to a lot of people, hey, if XYZ thing went away, would you care about it? They're like, yeah, it would be kind of unfortunate if that went away, or I'd lose a lot of money because I was in …”

“In some sense ICOs are kind of the gaming use case, right? It's kind of like a gambling, it's a gambling use case, right? And like, that's actually kind of what's happening is people are just gambling as real money.”

“Token fundraising ICOs, mostly raised on what are called SAFTS, Simple Agreements for Future Tokens... Mostly raised from hedge funds, venture funds, institutions, and again, angels putting money into these ICOs. But they're raising 10 to two hundred million d…”

“Right now, it is a very global phenomenon, so about as much money has been raised by ICOs based in Europe as based in the United States”

“I don't think I, ICOs are anything like IPOs. I think it's a really actually unfortunate naming convention that we have called them the same thing. They're much more similar to seed fundraising.”

“As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the ICOs are scams. Or just like, these are companies that, if they were trying to raise from the people in the room, here, maybe they'd be able to raise half a million dollars, but instead they go do an ICO, and they…”

“I think this idea that, like, everyone is going to just raise money from the crowd, like, I think we'll find out that we have securities laws for a reason, and that we want some level of that”

“Because we think that most of the ICOs today are entrepreneurs raising money via an ICO because it's cheaper than equity and not because they actually think the ICO is going to help the economics of the business.”

“Radical in that, like so early, there's an equal amount of money in ICOs being raised by startups as venture money.”

“Don't really believe it's sustainable.”

“So I do think that this is an inflection point for the entire ecosystem, and that this concept of a crowd sale or so-called ICO is really a case of the genie being out of the bottle, and it will irreversibly change the pace of software development in this ecos…”

“I'm just going to go tap into an ICO, and then they raise a hundred million dollars, and they don't know what to do with it, and they have no experience whatsoever. Like, sometimes that's not, I mean, maybe those will end well, but I would take the other side …”

“The vast majority of ICOs are kind of ridiculous right now, But there are a few that are very, very interesting and represent a true innovation in a inherently kind of business model and computer science problem of the last 30 years, which is how do you moneti…”

“You know, we avoid the term ICO precisely because we don't want to associate it with a security offering.”

“The other thing is, a lot of these are ICOs, but no one's answered the question, what happens when that ICO money runs out? There's no ongoing source of revenue for these projects to sustain themselves for the long term.”

“People are launching an ICO instead of going to VCs and You know, the deals that they're getting, it's like it's unheard of. Like you basically are getting way more money and you don't have investors to pay back. Like you own everything. And I mean, there's ju…”

“We raised the world's very first venture fund via an ICO. So we limited the size. We capped it at just a small, ten million dollar offering to make sure that, you know, we can mitigate, mitigate risk there. And make sure that it's successful. That offering, th…”

“First of all, two years ago, this whole opportunity of raising money in millions without giving away equity didn't exist. So this is all new thing. This is, you know, new amazing thing, you know from the crypto heaven that comes to startups, that they can rais…”

“Yes, so you basically build a community because on, on, on a good ICO, you have 5000 investors. So you're talking to a lot of people, and they are not investors, they're contributors, but 5000 people put money into these early token,”

“Well, see, my thing is, is I think the reason on that all these ICOs are being valued so highly is because people are drinking the crypto hype, not the first blood vision hype. So people are just pouring money into crypto wherever they can, and it's driving al…”

“Because people, same reason as any startup team cannot deliver what they said on a business plan or white paper that they will, you know, then they actually didn't have the market that they thought. It wasn't real need. You know, it wasn't real problem. They t…”

“More than 90% of these ICOs will fail. That's what I foresee. I mean, it's really obvious.”