The Return of the ICO | Ryan & David

Welcome to Bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on the show we explore the frontier of capital formation on public blockchains. The big question we're asking today, are ICOs back? MegaETH, Monet, Aztec, Infinex, Zama. These are five big high quality projects and they are all doing public token sales. Some of these even doing the work ahead of their sale to classify their token as a consumptive good, as opposed to a security, which allowed unaccredited investors to invest right alongside everyone else. Ryan, I want this to happen. I want ICOs to return. The fact that we are seeing not five c tier projects or b tier projects, but five a tier industry leading projects all doing token sales inside of two or three months of each other, I think is a very big deal. It's something that I hope continues. And if it does continue, the implications for what this does to crypto and what this means for Ethereum, I think, are very, very large. And that's what I want to discuss with you here today on the show. Yeah. I think the question is, not have they returned, but it's just, like, observing that they are returning and then trying to extrapolate that moving forward if this trend changes. To me, capital formation has always been one of the central money verbs of decentralized finance. Right? So when we started talking about, like, what is this bankless thing? If Bitcoin brought us the ability to hold a store of value asset without a bank, going bankless and holding on to your value and also transacting some of that value, Okay. Those are two money verbs. There's holding, and then there's also payment or transacting. Right? DeFi was about pursuing all of the other different verbs, borrowing and and lending and swapping and also capital formation, or maybe raising would be a term for that or minting would be a term. It is true to say, though, that crypto has had a complicated relationship with capital raising on chain in the past. Yeah. Capital formation. Right? So the ICO, the I guess, maybe the immaculate ICO for an ethmaxi out there was Ethereum, and it was relatively unpolluted. It's just because it was the first time Yeah. That this happened. Every other ICO since, particularly in the first cycle of these capital formation ICOs, had kind of a a taint to them, and it got progressively worse as the cycle continued. I know you were, awakened to crypto in that 2017 cycle. Many have called this the the Ethereum cycle or even the ICO cycle. You actually correct me if I'm wrong, David, but you got your start in an ICO company during those days when there was a lot of, like, shenanigans going like, it was it was not all good on the capital raise formation side of things. So I imagine you have a complicated relationship to …