According to a tweet by BitMEX Research, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, was identified as an advisor for at least 13 Initial Coin Offering (ICO).

The tweet was made in response to a discussion on Twitter on whether Buterin encouraged people to spend Ether (ETH) on ICOs or not. More recently, Buterin has called for governments to regulate token sales.

Vitalik Buterin Was Involved in 13 ICOs

According to the report published by BitMEX Research on September 29, 2017, Vitalik Buterin is the most prolific person when it comes to ICO involvement. Buterin was involved in 13 projects, which is 2.5 percent of the total ICOs out of the 520 ICOs that were analyzed in the report. The recent Twitter discussion has raised concerns on whether Buterin deliberately promoted ICOs to profit from them.

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Among the ICOs that Buterin was involved as an advisor include Zcash, We Trust, TenX, Nuco, Augur, Kyber Network, Smartpool, Gnosis, Storj, Akasha, and The DAO. However, many of these claims seem to be false, as Akasha, Zcash, and Smartpool did not even have an ICO and Buterin himself clarified that he held no tokens or shares in Nuco. In response, BitMex Research said that their data was accurate, adding that many of these projects that planned to sell tokens listed Vitalik as an advisor. They also clarified that Akasha did list Vitalik Buterin as an advisor to try and get support for a crowd sale but ultimately, failed to generate sufficient demand.

Buterin Calls for Governments to Regulate Token Sales

In a recent interview with The Star, Buterin said that governments have an important part to play in the advancement of the cryptocurrency industry. He added that they can help in regulating tokens sales such as initial coin offerings and security token offerings. The young Ethereum co-founder also went into detail on Ethereum’s future, which will see it transition from the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake system.

In October 2017, speaking at the ETHWaterloo hackathon, Buterin said,

“It is an established fact that ninety percent of startups fail. And it should also be an established fact that 90 percent of these ERC20s on CoinMarketCap are going to go to zero.”

He also said that the centralization of ICO projects is a serious flaw for ERC-20 token-based projects since they are conducted by a closed group of developers or companies funded by venture capitalists. He added that ERC-20 tokens were in a phase of development or “token 1.0” and investors should expect many projects to be “very bad ideas.”

Do you believe that the ICO space has matured since 2017, especially with the introduction of security tokens over the past year? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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