I wrote in June about my problem with the growing ICO trend.

Even though we haven’t seen an acceleration since June, I now believe the field will continue accelerating further. And with good reason.

I had breakfast this week with Ami from SPiCE VC. Ami explained to me their ICO model … and I think something finally clicked with me. I actually understood why blockchain is needed, and isn’t just a buzzword. I understood how they’re doing a legal token sale… and I think I’m finally over my anti-ICO phase.

SPiCE explain their model, so I’ll just summarize:

It’s a liquid VC. They invest in various companies (not just blockchain), with the added bonus over a traditional VC that your investment is liquid/tokenized. They are fully legal and compliant. They studied regulation from around the world and are codifying it into their ICO & token redemption mechanisms. They are not “fully decentralized”. The government has the option to freeze an account, in case of legal issues e.g. theft/money laundering. Still, blockchain is useful to them. Even in the presence of such a freeze button, since they are running as a standard Ethereum ERC20 token, they get all the benefits of transparency & immutability of the ledger. In other words, private/modified/not-fully-decentralized blockchains or are not equivalent to a centralized database as many have claimed.

The conversation with Ami was a real eye opener for me. As an early Bitcoiner and a leader of the world’s first ICO who got burned in the process, I was opposed to almost every ICO I heard of. I tagged them as either scams or incompetence. Not anymore.

There is still a lot of buzz in the field, and 90%+ of ICOs will fail. But I will be keeping an eye out for those that don’t — they are going to change the world.