Have you heard about bitcoin? It is a cryptocurrency, according to wikipedia:

cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets

Do you know that there are many more cryptocurrencies? In fact, every day new coins (tokens) are created. The process of a new coin creation is called ICO (Initial Coin Offering). During this process, participants can buy newly created coins. It is a form of funding for new companies/organizations. Usually, the price of new tokens during ICO is low because behind the token there is only prototype or idea and not many people are aware of the new project. However, when the new token reaches the exchange or the company ships a product, the token price can increase several times. For example, if you were an early investor in Ethereum (ETH), you could buy 1 ETH for about 0.30 USD, while at the moment of writing this article it costs 936 USD. It is about 300,000% of the return. If you had invested 100 USD in Ethereum ICO you would have earned about 300,000 USD :-)

Ethereum price from https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/ (accessed 16Feb2018)

Looking at these crazy returns you will understand that many people would like to invest in such projects. But it is not so easy. Currently, there are so many ICOs running that selecting the right project for investment is difficult. Very often ICO can be a scam and investors will loose all their money.

Top-5 ICOs returns, source https://icostats.com/roi-since-ico (accessed 16Feb2018)

There are many sites that aggregate the information about upcoming ICOs, for example: icodrops. There are also people in cryptocurrencies community that track and score upcoming ICOs. One of my favourite ICO influencers is Ian Balina. He has data-driven approach for selecting ICO investments. He has a spreadsheet where each ICO is described with numbers, points and grades. Based on computed score he is selecting his investments. Nice!