Source: https://cryptorecorder.com/2018/06/09/top-5-private-tokensales-ton-and-other-icos-in-which-you-would-never-participate/

In the recent year the ICO market has undergone a significant transformation. Today, it seems significantly harder for small investors to take part in a serious ICO, since major funds and accredited investors cherry pick with TON being a perfect example of an ICO only available for participation to major private investors. It’s time you knew about those projects which you may never be able to invest into.

The recent project IMMO tops this list. Currently almost no details regarding the project are available. It is believed that a rich banker dynasty and their representatives are behind IMMO’s development. Information about IMMO has leaked into social networks, including closed Telegram channels, attracting attention of large cryptocurrency media.

The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, has spoken against the launch of IMMO: “I don’t trust governments and large corporations to have interests that are aligned with us”.

According to confidential sources, both leading blockchain technology and traditional finance specialist are involved in IMMO’s implementation. It has been speculated that IMMO is backed by gold and that it can be legalized, as well as its connection to real estate. Currently it is rather tricky to be able to count all the existing opinions as the experts’ points of view widely differ.

However it remains obvious, should IMMOs be really developed by major players, then public tokensale, if ever made available, would be solely for demonstrating a pseudo-democratic nature of the project.

Starkware Industries has long refused to hold a public ICO. They announced it a while ago. Among the advisors and investors of this blockchain project are Vitalik Buterin, Naval Ravikant, Pantera Capital, Bitmain, Polychain Capital and other major investment funds.

StarkWare will improve scalability and privacy in blockchains using STARK technology, providing cryptographic proofs that are zero-knowledge, succinct, transparent (no need for a trusted setup), and post-quantum secure.

The development of Starkware is carried out by a strong team with a vast experience of working with Zcash; Alessandro Chiesa, Eli Ben-Sasson, Michael Riabzev, and Uri Kolodny.

Currently little information on the project is available. Social networks barely feature any updates on the matter and the project has not been advertised. This signifies the fact that the team is closely involved in technology, while does not invest in advertising.

Back in February, IoTeX held Private Sale. Having collected a hard cap of 25,000 ETH, the project refused to hold Public Sale. Unlike the projects that took place in the past, IoTeX tokens are actively traded on stock exchange.

IoTeX’s aim is to integrate all the disparate IoT into a single ecosystem and strictly maintain the network security. The cutting-edge blockchain-in-blockchain architecture will address the scalability, privacy, isolatability, and developability issues relating to the IoT DApps and ecosystem growth.

Amongst IoTeX team are cryptography PhD specialist, distributed systems and machine learning professionals, and top-level engineers and developers. On April 20, the Testnet Preview was released. Next release at the end of June is expected to include the first implementation of a complete Roll-DPoS consensus scheme with voting support. In the long run, however, IoTeX focuses on developing subchains, software development toolkits (SDK), and partnering with IoT companies in order to build Dapps using the IoTeX platform.

Origin is a sharing economy marketplace and set of protocols that enable buyers and sellers of fractional use goods and services (car-sharing, service-based tasks, home-sharing, etc.) to transact on the distributed and open web. Origin Protocol plans to offer buyers and sellers control over their data, drastically reduced transaction fees, and identity verification / reputation scores.

Additionally, Origin will enable developers to create Dapps based on their own protocol.

Telegram ICO — one of the most discussed topic in the crypto community. The plans regarding the launch of Telegram Open Network were announced as early as December, followed by an online leak of White Paper. While it is possible that every cryptocurrency investor would like to buy Gram tokens, it was revealed in May that there will not be a public sale of the tokens.

The two phases of Private Sale of Telegram Group Inc. attracted a total of $1.7 billion from fewer than 200 private investors. Despite a large number of initial participation applications the majority of them were rejected.

Among Telegram’s plans is a creation of an entire ecosystem of blockchain services. Besides other services, TON will include an online wallet, distributed file storage, a proxy service for creating decentralized VPN services, services for decentralized apps, smart contracts, and decentralized web browsing experiences.

To date, Telegram has 200 million active users. A popular messenger, founded in August 2013, has not shared a single byte of personal data of their users to any third-party. Actively advocating freedom of speech and anonymity, Telegram enjoys great confidence and trust placed in it by its users.

The change in the token-model of the new ICOs is primarily due to the strengthening of regulation. In addition, funds and private investors seem to be more interested in long-term profits and strategic partnerships than small investors. Thus, those companies holding ICOs tend to favor Private Sales which essentially are closed rounds of investments. It seems to have become the newest trend in the market.