What Happened to ICOs?

I worked for a company that was on the vanguard of trying to make ICOs legal and mainstream. Among other problems, there were tensions between trying to achieve regulatory compliance, transparency, and privacy of trades. I worked on a potential solution involving ring signatures, but it never made it into production.

There were some other important tensions too, happy to discuss if anyone wants to get into the weeds. FWIW I still would love to see a highly fluid market for shares in small businesses and pre-IPO startups.

I still use them for the window's main image. Simply put them in your .RC and they'll be embedded as a resource for you to use.

Regulations were the big one. It's hard to magically bootstrap instant utility for tokens.

The rest were all trying to either replace fiat or replace stocks, both of which are heavily regulated.

The US SEC declared them to be securities offerings, which are extremely heavily regulated.

You should perhaps explain what you mean by "ICOs", rather than only using the abbreviation.