Note, prices taken prior to October 09, 2017

An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a currently unregulated means by which funds are raised for a new cryptocurrency venture. ICOs are a new and effective way to raise money from the community for digital projects, and as they are extremely new, they haven’t been regulated yet for the most part. Some ICOs pretend to set up a crowdfunding campaign, to prevent being treated as a security; One of the most crucial things for an ICO is to build a good legal financial model for raising money. In an ICO campaign, a percentage of the cryptocurrency is sold to early backers of the project in exchange for legal tender fiat or for cryptocurrencies (usually Ethereum). There have been many high profile ICOs thus far. With companies like Storj, raising $30 million for their decentralized cloud storage platform; Brave which raised $34 million in roughly 30 seconds; Aragon which raised $25 million in about 20 minutes; and Gnosis, the originator of the Reverse Dutch Auction, which raised $12 million in about 12 minutes. And most recently, Bancor, which has raised an astounding $140 million in just a few hours!

Ethereum And The Rise Of ICOs

Ethereum is an open source, public, blockchain-based, distributed computing platform, in short, a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts. Ethereum’s platform has gained a lot of traction over time with its native value token, Ether, currently priced at around $302.06. But was Ethereum the first or the largest ICO ever, as some may believe? Let’s find out!

Ethereum’s ICO

The Ethereum ICO was held from the 20th of July, 2014, to the 2nd of September, 2014. $18.4 million at the time were collected during the ICO period, making it the second most successful ICO ever held up until that time. Ethereum’s Ether is mined through a Proof-of-Work protocol that is set to change to Proof-of-Stake. The fact that the development team held the funds in BTC led to it losing a big portion of its funding due to volatility. Several projects have been and are being built on the Ethereum Virtual Machine, like the DigixDAO, Ardor, Singular-DTV, and Iconomi, among many other decentralized apps.

NEO’s ICO

NEO is a Chinese blockchain startup that is developing a blockchain for digital asset ownership, by AntShares. AntShares’ aim is to create a blockchain that represents legal Proof-of-Ownership that is accepted by the broader society. The project has managed to gather a lot of attention from the Bitcoin community for combining smart contracts and digital assets to create a smart assets platform. AntShares held its first ICO in October 2015, where it sold 17.5 million tokens and managed to raise around $550,000. The Antshares token, which carries the ticker ANS, but is now known as NEO, launched at $0.032 in late 2015. In September 2016, Antshares’ second coin offering to develop its platform sold 22.5 million tokens and managed to raise $4.5 million. Antshares token NEO (ANS) has since risen to around $33.74. NEO’s all-time high was around $47.58 in August 16th, 2017.

Lisk’s ICO

Lisk is a modular Smart Contract and Dapp platform that aims to make their deployment accessible to all developers by allowing them to be coded in Javascript, one of the most popular programming languages. The Lisk cryptocurrency uses a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) consensus mechanism. The Lisk ICO was held from the 22nd of February until the 21st of March, 2016. During this time period, users were allowed to send Bitcoin in exchange for Lisk tokens. $5,700,000 in funds were gathered. The cryptocurrency’s token is currently priced at around $5.34.

Tezos’ ICO

Tezos has just recently finished a record high ICO, having gathered 65,703 bitcoins & 361,122 ether according to their website, around $232,000,000 according to coindesk. It began on July 1st, 2017, and went until the passing of 2,000 transaction blocks on the Bitcoin network. This has made Tezos the leader in the ICO race. According to their website: “Tezos is a new decentralized blockchain that governs itself by establishing a true digital commonwealth. It facilitates formal verification, a technique which mathematically proves the correctness of the code governing transactions and boosts the security of the most sensitive or financially weighted smart contracts.”

The DAO’s ICO

The DAO gathered roughly $160,000,000 from May 28th and ended on June 25th, 2016. During this time period users were allowed to purchase newly created DAO tokens with Ether (ETH). During the first 15 days, the conversion rate for DAO tokens to ETH was 100–1, and it rose gradually by 0.05 ETH per day, until it reached the 100–1.5 scale. During the ICO, users sent Ether to a smart contract address that would, in turn, create DAO tokens and send them to the address from which the Ether came from. The DAO ICO was for a risk-free investment option, in which a user could always recover the Ether sent on a 1–100 scale, by splitting these DAO tokens, regardless of their market price. DAO holders can now withdraw ETH from the DAO on an exchange rate of 1–100.

Waves’ ICO

The Waves Platform is a custom token and asset platform focused on business applications, with features like custom tokens, and asset issuance and exchange, fiat gateways, and crowdfunding tools. The Waves ICO started on the 12th of April and lasted until the 31st of May 2016, with $16,436,095 gathered. During the first day, users received a 20% bonus. The token has been trading under it’s ICO value since the beginning of its release on exchanges, which can also be attributed to delays in the Roadmap. The waves token is currently priced at $5.00.

Stratis’ ICO

Stratis is a Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform that allows corporations to create their own custom private or public sidechains for their business needs. Stratis allows users to combine various features from other blockchains and to test various variations of blockchain specifications and features. The Stratis ICO took place from the 21st of July to the 26th of 2016, and it gathered 915 BTC ($598,684.5). Since its release Stratis has increased in value +400% with it token going for $3.72. Users received a 20% bonus during the first five days, which was then reduced to 10% for the next ten days, and then 5% for the next ten days after that.

The GetLine Network And Its ICO!

The GetLine Network is an open source, Ethereum blockchain-based, globally-capable, P2P lending protocol (a decentralized P2P lending platform), allowing for trustworthy, yet trustless credit scoring, effortless lending, and accessible borrowing. We believe the GetLine Network will empower people all over the world to be part of a single financial system built up on the Ethereum blockchain. The GetLine Network offers a smart contract layer. The lending contract is safely performed and settled in accordance to set regulations for both parties. This network is made up of entities called Attesters of Risk Analysis that provide risk evaluations of the credibility of borrowers, which effectively forms a prediction market. The past ARA’s scores are put to the test on our scoring system. Here, every ARA’s past accuracy of credit scores is provided for all to see. This fosters healthy competition, and assesses the trustworthiness of the credit scores they have awarded to previous borrowers. GET tokens are issued for the purpose of aligning incentives in the network. For example, in order to help stop fraudulent activity on the part of the ARAs, they must pay a fee of 1% of every loan, regardless of whether or not it defaults, in GET tokens to the network. Everyone involved will be requiree to “have skin in the game”. Our ICO is starting soon, you can learn more at: getline.in.

Conclusion:

First of all, Ethereum is not the first or the highest ICO ever conducted. Secondly, these ICOs are bringing in insane numbers, some of them coming through with what they have promised, and some of them dropping the ball short of what they’ve said they will do. Despite the failures, the numbers show that people really believe in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, either for the sake of what they offer technically and/or practically, or for their monetary investment value. We certainly hope to see more and more meaningful ICO tokens in the future that stay true to what they say they’ll bring to the table, and hopefully, some of them that are worthwhile will break new records in the ICO world.