110  Blockchain

As the ICOs are unregulated, customers are not protected by the finan-

cial regulators in case of fraud. The lack of protection offered to investors of

ICO is a cause for concern; hence, regulators are reviewing the ICO rules,

and it is a matter of time before they come up with regulations to tighten the

rules surrounding ICOs like initial public offering (IPO).

The very first ICO was held by Mastercoin in July 2013. As mentioned

within this chapter, Ethereum raised money with a token sale in 2014, rais-

ing 3,700 BTC in its first 12 hours. The funds raised for Ethereum were

equal to approximately $2.3 million at the time of ICO.

Successful ICOs

In this section, we will walk through the most successful ICOs of all time

and then also run through unsuccessful ones whereby investors lost money

or the ICO was closed due to it not meeting the minimum token sell.

• Ethereum (https://ethereum.org/en/): Ethereum ICO was one of the

early pioneers in 2014. The token was listed at around USD 0.31 and

it raised about $18m in just 42 days. The current price of Ethereum at

the time of writing was 4,681 USD. Ethereum was the only platform

that has an inbuilt digital currency called ETH, providing a develop-

ment platform for decentralised applications and NFTs and also came

up with smart contracts.

• IOTA (https://www.iota.org): IOTA’s ICO was launched in late 2015

and sold about a billion IOTA tokens raising over USD 400k. The

initial token price during ICO was $0.63. At the time of writing, the

IOTA price was $1.30. IOTA provides a unique offering that provides

combined elements of the internet of things (IoT) and blockchain tech-

nology to conduct transactions.

• NEO (https://neo.org): NEO is a Chinese open-source blockchain

project that went through the ICO in October 2015 raising about

$550k. NEO went through a second ICO in late 2016 raising $4.5m.

At the time of writing, NEO was trading at about $47.50. Neo ICO

token was only $0.032. NEO has provided exceptional return on

investment (ROI) to many early investors and is therefore considered

a successful ICO.

• Stratis (https://www.stratisplatform.com): Stratis ICO happened in

2016. Stratis ICO raised around 1,000 Bitcoins valued at around $675k

at the time of the ICO. Stratis’s initial token (STRAX) price was set

to $0.007 and at the time of writing was trading at $2.0. The Stratis

platform enables businesses to create, test and deploy customers’ block-

chain applications without having to set up or maintain their own infra-

structure. It is also compatible with multiple programming languages.