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.
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.
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.
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.
I would love to hear from a crypto fan, which was the most successful ICO? And where is it today?
Citation needed.
It was painful to watch how many people you think should know better fall for the most basic schemes.
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]
Turns out few, if any, had any breakthrough or worthwhile technology