Chainfeeds Summary:
ICOs are experiencing a resurgence, and this time, hopefully, there will be a better design.
Article source:
https://x.com/ahboyash/status/1993316749538627729
Article Author:
Ash
Opinion:
Ash: An ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is essentially a project selling tokens directly to users (in exchange for ETH or stablecoins) to simultaneously launch capital and community. Its core concept is to distribute ownership more broadly to users and builders, not just private funds or teams. Prioritize widespread distribution (getting more people to support your protocol), contributory ownership, and using a micro-community as the engine for network growth. Current fundraising methods have problems including: 1) High FDV + low circulation: leading to enormous unlocking pressure and an unbalanced holder structure; 2) Lack of price discovery: price discovery occurs during private placements and secondary OTC; the price falls sharply during the actual TGE; 3) Retail investors become exit liquidity; 4) Unfair FCFS (First-Come, First-Served): those who get it are usually scripted bots, squeezing out the majority; 5) Rampant airdrop farmers: industrialized "point farming" operations emerge. Platforms worth noting: 1) HoloLaunch: An AI-native issuance platform that links token sales to the creator flywheel (Ava/Agent tools). Besides the public pool, the staking pool and creator pool allocate shares to users who actively produce and distribute content that matches the project, turning marketing into a participatory asset. However, Holoworld faces the problem of Solana's attention being monopolized by meme platforms like Pump.fun, so it must subsidize creator inflows to maintain its popularity. 2) Kraken: A reputation-based public fundraising platform prioritizing MiCA. It uses a combination of Legion Score (on-chain behavior, GitHub, social reputation) to determine allocation, reducing Sybil attacks and account manipulation. The goal is to align the cap table with genuine value contributors. However, on-chain transaction manipulation/paid bots can still increase scores, undermining the "contribution-centric" USP. 3) Coinbase: A capital formation and discovery platform deeply integrated with Coinbase. Selling points include institutional-grade, compliance, distribution capabilities, and on-chain transparency. It democratizes access, allowing qualified users to invest alongside top VCs without establishing an entity or cross-border transfers, but KYC is still required, and (in some cases) investor verification is necessary. Full public access has not yet been achieved. Coinbase's US background means that all future Echo offerings could potentially be viewed as securities offerings. 4) Capital Launchpad: A platform combining social graphs and on-chain relevance (AI-driven, limiting whale and bots), linked to the existing Yaps social system, giving researchers priority (but many of these are bots artificially inflating engagement). Project conditions are set; users subscribe; team allocation is based on reputation/consistency. However, four out of the last six tokens have recently fallen below their initial offering price, such as Novastro (-69%) and Everlyn (-53%), impacting confidence. The Yaps algorithm is not public, allowing spam content to still climb the rankings, leading small accounts to complain of a "Yaps prison," indicating insufficient transparency. [Original text in English]
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