Stupid ICOs

There are otherwise good projects that are putting a death sentence on themselves by introducing an unnecessary token and raising money through an ICO.

An example is a for-profit company that makes an app and charges fees to its users. It then issues a token. The token's purpose is to be used to pay the app fees. The company sells the token in the offering with the promise that as the app becomes more popular, the token will appreciate.

This creates two groups of stakeholders that will have opposing interests sooner or later: the equity holders in the company and the token holders. The team is responsible for both groups, which puts them in an impossible situation.

Founders are blinded by the promise of raising money without being diluted. Instead, they create a second mechanism for extracting value (tokens) that becomes competitive with the first (shares).

They have effectively diluted anyways — a finite amount of value can be extracted, regardless of the mechanism.

The main problem is the conflict of interest. It will likely lead to both shares and tokens to zero.

It’s frustrating because some of these projects could have been successful companies otherwise.

Thanks to Tomek Kolinko for the conversations that led to this writing.