From the production of goods to their distribution, storage, and trading to the retail cash-to-carry model, it’s a tangled web. Bitcoin is widely used as a digital currency and for investment by organizations and individuals. Blockchain technology is revolutionizing financial markets by decentralizing them — making transactions transparent and eliminating the need for third parties.
These decentralized networks are incredibly well suited to finance issues with large sums of capital at risk, which means that ICOs powered by blockchain is the future of capital funding. However, you may wonder what an ICO is for those without the tech community jargon developed in Silicon Valley.
An ICO stands for Initial Coin Offering. It allows you to raise capital by selling your company’s digital currency (or tokens). The ICO is a way of crowdfunding capital to develop or fund an idea or business. Numerous well-known crowdfunding websites are the most well-known form of fundraising. Instead of giving money directly to someone who asks for it, it allows donors to give money for projects that interest them.
Theoretically, this could be used by companies seeking funding without complying with traditional venture investment models and regulations. However, ICOs are largely unregulated in the United States. Notably, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has indicated that these coins may be considered securities and thus may be subject to securities laws.
Why is this happening now?
Blockchain technology has become mainstream and will become the core platform to facilitate transactions with digital currency. However, traditionally evaluation of blockchain projects was driven by a simple open-source code repository on GitHub or a similar platform with no clarity as to how it will work in real-world scenarios leading to huge failure rates of such projects during the initial stage of execution.
Without a developer or an experienced blockchain engineer, people can create a project within minutes. The processes that take days or months to set up a new venture can be done in a few minutes through the platform, which offers an end-to-end solution to start your project.
How an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Works?
This is means of crowdfunding through releasing a new cryptocurrency. People can use it for digital currency (cryptocurrency) and non-digital currency business projects.
ICOs are an extremely controversial topic within the cryptocurrency community. Many members strongly argue that ICOs are causing massive damage to the crypto market in general due to their reckless abandoned nature without considering whether their project has actual value; it’s just about getting money and running away with millions of dollars, with investors left out in the cold.
ICOs can be structured in a few different ways, including:
Static supply and fixed price: Buyers are only allowed to purchase tokens at a fixed rate of the base cryptocurrency (e.g., 0.5 ETH per 1,000 RKT). In other words, if you send 1 ETH to this contract, you will receive 500 RKT, not more and not less.
Static supply with a dynamic price: Buyers can only purchase tokens at a fixed price of the base cryptocurrency (e.g., 0.5 ETH per 1,000 RKT). However, the number of tokens to be issued is not fixed. If you send 1 ETH to this contract, you will receive X RKT (with X being the total supply of RKT then)
Dynamic supply with a dynamic price: The number of tokens to be issued and the price of the base cryptocurrency are fixed when entering a transaction. However, within this contract, either one or both can change over time. For example, if you send 1 ETH to this contract, you will receive X RKT during this ICO period (with X being the total supply of RKT then). However, after this ICO period ends, you will receive Y RKT (with Y being the total supply of RKT then).
Ethereum-based smart contracts are typically used to implement ICOs. In a typical ICO project, the development team behind the project deploys a smart contract on Ethereum. Potential buyers send Ether to this contract address in exchange for newly issued tokens. The contract then sends these tokens back to their respective owners.
Initial Coin Offering (ICO) vs. Initial Public Offering (IPO):
When Ethereum emerged, ICOs were initially seen as the new “fad” as digital coins tried to find their value within the crypto market. However, ICOs have been used by many established and well-known companies. However, ICOs and other Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) have been criticized by some in the financial community: some claiming that it’s a form of crowdfunding scam; others that it is unregulated security; some feel there is little benefit; and still others who see the significant potential but worry about fraud.
IPOs are sales that allow shareholders in a company to buy the stock at the offering price. It is usually done with an intermediary, like a mutual fund manager or investment bank, which allows you to invest smaller sums of money and diversify risk. IPOs are offered by private companies and aren’t reviewed by the SEC. In some cases, starting at $500,000 for smaller companies.
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