Starting at the beginning of this year: the entirety of the cryptocurrency market has taken a significant hit with regards to coin value, affecting investors and prolonging the expected launch date of many public ICO token-sales.

Amongst those cryptos worst hit is Ether (ETH). The second-largest by means of market capitalization lost upwards of 85% of its value YTD and trades at $207.73 at the time of writing. A massive drop in comparison to its peak of $1,400 in January 2018.

The overwhelming negative volatility that has dominated the market spells bad news for investors and what’s more, there has been a handful of examples of industry experts and luminaries claiming that we are unlikely to see astronomical value growth again any time soon.

The Times of 1000x Growth Are Gone

Amongst these doomsayers is Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin who, speaking at an Ethereum Conference, claimed:

“There isn’t an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore.”

Additional highlights from Buterin’s appearance at the event includes his belief that well-founded and sustainable value increases are best achieved alongside wide-spread mainstream adoption. We have seen many examples of projects which promise to help accomplish this in the past, including blockchain powered mobile browser Brave.

For this to happen, DApps developers need to ensure the actual utility of their decentralized systems and that it’s at least as seamless and as efficient as centralized platforms.

Good ICOs vs Inflatable Forks

ICOs have become one of the defining aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrency between 2017 and now, however, they have seen their fair share of criticisms.

One of the most prominent of these regards’ tokens with insufficient unique qualities, or use cases, in comparison to pre-existing tokens. In the case of such tokens being forks, many attribute those unsuccessful to an over-inflation of their parent-tokens’ value.

Others, however, offer innovative and tested solutions which promise to deliver considerable value at a utilitarian and economic level – and better yet, many of these also provide attractive investor incentives such as airdrops and referral bonuses.

How to Use Good-ICOs to Maximize Investments

Another intriguing method which some ICOs are implementing is to fix ETH at a certain price point, pegging it to their issued tokens or coins.

One example of these is the ‘Depository Network’. It is an upcoming ICO which intends to provide perhaps the very first ‘decentralized multi-platform collateral infrastructure’ and has fixed a price for ETH set to $800.

In other words, regardless of the current price of Ether on the major exchanges, users will be able to purchase DEPO tokens with ETH where the price for it will be set to $800.

For instance, let’s assume that the abovementioned ICO will be allocating tokens at $0.02 throughout the ICO.

If an investor was to take part at a time where ETH was trading for $200 on an exchange and the value were to subsequently appreciate greatly – over time due to the ongoing fixing of $800 for 1 ETH.

Other Prime Examples

The Depository Network is certainly not the only project which does it. Moolyacoin, for instance, is another project which allows the same thing – an ecosystem created for digital and blockchain based start-up projects.

If you can find a project like this that you trust in (for recommendations, look at Hacked.com’s great ICO Analysis section) you’d get greater value for your ETH. Not only is it transparent and legal, but also offers a discount on the regular price of the newly issued tokens.

What do you think of this creative way to get a value of ETH higher than that on the exchanges? Do you have experience taking part in such programs in the past? What ICOs would you recommend? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!