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Just read this article about ICOs and their history - http://cryptofinance24.com/the-first-icos-a-history-of-crypto-fundraising-p410-171.htm (http://cryptofinance24.com/the-first-icos-a-history-of-crypto-fundraising-p410-171.htm)

Made me wonder, what are your ICO success stories and your failures? What has been your most successful investment, where have you lost the most etc?
Want to hear some tales.

Let's go..!

my experience in participating in ico failed, at that time ICO only lasted one week with only 30 eth hardcap target but all in vain with failure,

investing in the market by buying cheap but potent coins, which makes me get multiple profits

My biggest loss when investing in HYIP, I remind all crypto fans to avoid HYIP which is very detrimental

I took part in the bezop bounty, did translation work, twitter and facebook and got exactly 0 tokens for that!
Come to think of it that was the first campaign I ever took part in.

Iconomi got me x10
Peerplay x3-5

PureVidz is one of the worst project i believe in, same towards another dicing project which both of these project has show some progress and end up scam lul

I have not invested in many icos and as you may guess my experiences are not very positive, I have lost money with every single one of them so I came to the point in which even if I think that there is a lot of profits to be made in the market of icos, right now I am not ready to keep investing in this market because it's very likely that I'm going to keep losing money.

But for the current market situation, ICOs would have performed better this year. Anyway i still see this as a way to clear out the mess and ensure only te good ones remain. Credits and LYMPO have been an awesome project for me this year.

On the other hand people are afraid of ICOs because of numerous scams and fails. Even worthy projects remain without investments

My first success story for ICO is pundi x, good price than ICO price and mangement dev is working so good in marketing and publishing, my biggest fail is bankera..go hell with bankera its suck

I have only taken part in one ICO, it was Thought (THT). This one remains to be seen, where it gets me. Although, everything seems ok right now and the team looks solid as well. Hopefully, they will deliver  :)

Interesting read here, thanks for the thread.

My story began with an investment experiment in one of the ICO that I won't forget,the initial entry of the exchange was balanced and right at the target token value of the project then after 3-4 months it changed and even exceeded the 10x profit I didn't expect to be successful there but that happened.

my stories aren't that great.. failures, failures everywhere.. lol, but seriously.. have participated in i think 6-7 icos, lost couple of grand and only one of them has delivered what they promised. that might be my own mistake and not doing the homework.. but still there are lots of icos that fail to meet the expectations.. do your homework boys and girls!

I'm very conservative when it comes to giving money to someone. I'm doing deep research of every project I'm interested investing in. So far it has worked out for me. I have taken part of 4 ICO-s and all of them have pocketed me some good returns.  
8)

my successfull ICO thats get huge profit is pundix and auto, my biggest fail is bankera..ICO in this end off year not have much interesting point anymore

Any more stories here?

I ever invested in several ICOs like flixxo, and this project is difficult answered like trading, I am wrong in strategy, I do not update information and charts, so I sell it at a very cheap price.

in the end, I was disappointed, because at the end of 2017, flixxo reached the highest value of $ 1.

I only invested on 2 ICO's so far.

1. a casino site which open ia crowdfund last year, I would say so-so performance, I was expecting it to be big however, I was a bit disappointed.
2. A trading platform this year, too many hypes surrounding this exchange, but failed or missed schedule and the price didn't bounce back as expected.

So I guess the bear season has really something to do why my second ICO investment didn't turn out to be huge, but its a lessons learnt for me.

I also have joined some ICOs projects but I still have not gotten profit because most of them are dumped. I am still waiting for the recover of the market. Anyway, I still  feel lucky because there is no scam because before investing, I must check the team carefully. Even your projects are good or not, if their team has experience and knowledge well, they can help the project ICO successfully

my experience of ico success that I followed was populous from last year, it was the most ico that made me get a big profit. but my ico failure is spherical ico. where the ico did not reach the target and the funds from all investors were returned. this can be a learning for us in how it can be used as an experience.

Tierium and WeTrust. I thought they would be big. They are project that does not compete with BTC or ETH , but could make crypto more useful. SO I thought they would be on top 100 for a long time and decided to not sell when BTC hit 16k. Each of them has passed 100 MM marketcap in that time. And I would have won 1000x times what I have invested. Unfortunately today they worth less them the ICO price and could hit Zero as they are traded in almost none exchange.

From the few times I invested in ICOs, no one gave me a big profit, maybe only around 10-30%. But behind that I actually experienced a high failure until I lost almost 50% because the ICO I had invested became helpless after entering the market and making everyone do a dumper.

My main problem that I don't have any patience at all. I sold TNT before the pump, I sold MTC right before the pump( So choose wisely and have patience.

I only did a few ICOS, and sadly all of them failed, in terms of price, if you do not count the bull run. I still hold all of them,,, and they are always moving ahead with development but I have been disappointed in general because none of them are things I can really use. So I learned my lesson about these things and this year only took in tokens that I can earn from instead of just using, like so-called security tokens, for dividends.

What makes me sad is those scam ICOs or projects that do nothing, made people money. Like EOS. Come on.

Paradoxically, my most profitable investments in crypto were those that are not ICOs. I bought some new (PoW/PoS) coins shortly after their genesis block and that turned to be my "cash cow" now. Regarding to ICOs, I earned a bit and lost a bit, nothing significant.

Now I do not have much experience in participating in bounty companies.

I have ARCONA tokens and I think they will bring me good money. They have a real product and have already paid me tokens.

Would love to hear some more stories!

If we don’t want government regulation, we need to start self regulating the blockchain industry.

The more we, as a community, hold these companies to a higher standard, the more we can avoid strict regulation by government entities.

It may be too late, but it’s worth a try.

My most successful investment was when the ETH price went up, because I held ETH more than other coins. I have experienced my failure because of being cheated by a ponzi ICO that offered a large profit, and at that time I lost my assets, this is where I took the lesson that I have to be more careful in investing

My first ICO was just a dip in the water, but I 10x my money with the increase of ETH and the token's lock time made that investment up to 7x too! That was a very great experience for me and I was so happy about cryptocurrency, I even tried applying stock market TAs within the industry, and at some point in the past, it works most of the time! But for times like these past few months, I've been having pretty bad time reading the market and getting profits. Also, I have leapt out of the bear market a bit too late that's why I lost most of my profit of that early investment.

Success stories is when ETH is just starting up and sees the potential with smart-contracts it do really sparks my interest and i bought ETH when it was still on $1 per token and now look at on its price where im still on big profits inspite on this bearish market how much more if i do sold up on $1k price then that would be 1000x on my investment.Im still hodling though and talking about big loss then
it was the time i did make investment with Adex exchange ICO, i thought it would be a good one but i do lost up some big amounts of BTC on that project.

my first ico was Rise. i earned 3x of the ico price when i traded it. i thought i had already gained a lot since i was a beginner. but then after 2 years it has reached its all time high of $1 each rise. i regret at that instant that i have not hold some tokens. lesson learned, i must hold some of the ico i bought.

Well, I have never really had a sad story since I have started investing in ICOs.
Some ICOs I have invested in may not have made huge profit but one thing I believe in is the long term prospect of a project before I even decide to start investing in it at all.

Due diligence is something i do not joke with, it is my money and I really want to know the team I am giving my money to make use of, which any smart investor would not want to give their hard earned money to a team that cannot deliver and will always know the things to look out for when it comes to past experience to be able to know how to go about that.

Also, I do not invest in empty promises, if you do not have a product that can be used effectively in real life, then, you are irrelevant to me as a project. With this, I have been able to stand up tall in my ICO investment and get the best from it.

I have followed a campaign on an ICO project which I think is very successful and a big advantage for me, the ICO is Flixxo (FLIXX). even though at this time the price fell, but I have benefited greatly from the success of ICO Flixxo (FLIXX).

Investing  in ICOS or any kind of investment schemes failure or success both are part of our life
Since  i start herein cryptocurrency i experience a little failure and failure is a challenge how to become successful

I participated in utt and mntp and this is the two projects that I have really make money from and since then other one that I have invested in has not been doing well and some of them are now scam and fakes.  I will not like to say something about my experience with other projects here as it will affect them.  You should know that invest in icos is a highly risky venture and you should not go into it without proper understand on when to invest and the project to put money in and make money.

Only one ICO I have taken a part of - Latoken. Didn't really think much of it at first but when December arrived my original purchase was x5. Was happy to see that growth and sold my bags, final growth before the Big January Crypto Crash was I think around x7-x8.

If you really want to have a success story at the end, the most important thing is to have the mind of an investor. For every smart investor, they just do not participate in everything they see, the more qualitative the project they are investing in is, and the more they are always drawn towards it.

This is something that is lacking for a whole lot of people because they do not have an understanding of what to always look out for when it comes to due diligence and all they care about is to just invest in anything and then get rich in the long run even if they are investing in shit coins. The two major criteria to always look at are the team and the product availability as well as the prospect in the long term, and you won't miss it with this.

My biggest fail was investing into MinexCoin - 10USD for one coin in ICO price. After listing the value was arround 30-70USD, but I didnt sell and now, now they scammed people with creditcard delivery and the price dropped to 2USD.

I see many fail stories here, that's sad.

I have invested in 2 icos, both did ok. Nothing big, they didn't make me rich, but also I didn't lose any money. There are so many icos nowadays, but it is not that hard to find a project that has a nice idea with a solid team. https://news.icostream.org/ and other sites that help you to find icos do a big job for you.

My first failure following the ico project was in a dimcoin project, but behind the failure there must be success, I was very fortunate to be able to invest in utrust and electroneum projects, their project gave me a lot of profit when the coin entered the market and the project was great satisfy me with interesting features to date

I have invested on some ICOs last year. Those that has time limit and you have to race with a lot of investors just to buy token. Earning was OK at first then came the scam ICOs. After the ICO rush, they just disappeared and scammed a lot of investors. Since then I don't invest much to lessen the the risk of losing money. The worst investment I had ever was locked coins. The coin already entered exchange but investors tokens can't be withdrawed. Thus losing the chance of big profits. So thorough research is needed on investing on ICOs.

Glad to hear some success stories  :)
Why did you decide to invest in utrust and electroneum?

Biggest fail:

ESS $0.004 | 0.00000057 Ƀ
ICO Date: 2018-06-25
Raised: $25,500,000.00
Supply: 1,755,313,373.00

ROI USD: 0.08x
ROI ETH: 0.19x
ROI BTC: 0.08x

RIP Essentia :'(

That was a pretty good decision. I invested in some ICOs last year and within this period as well they really increased in price hugely, and being that I was not interested to sell anyway as I was more keep about the long term prospects of what I am holding, that drew me back to some extent.

I wish I actually did sell them and I would have bought most of them back right now, have a better position more and then even have a lot of money to play around with in the long run for further investment, but we always learn from our mistakes, right? I guess I have learned from mine and I believe there would always be another chance.

yes, there will be another chance.. no doubt.
i think we shouldn't think back and wonder if i did that then i would be rich.. we would wonder this our whole life with everything. embrace the situation and learn from it

Perhaps these projects will show themselves in the distant future, but their coin prices were at the level of the company's ico price, even after listing. And today, prices have fallen lower than expected.

Well thats life and anything is done on purpose.If we missed profits or making ourself to be rich on our investments then it isnt really time for us but somehow we do really learn on our past mistakes and its not too late to cope up on what we have lost in the past.Due to experience we will really able to picture out on what would be the good projects that are worth to hold on.

A quick rewind to 2017 when the ICO frenzy was in full swing happened to have gotten into an ICO, hardcap was reached and everything was successful, few weeks after getting to exchange, a ×10 increase was seen. I can only but reminisce on those good old days. 

my best ICO is Lisk and waves
both bring me good profit,, but now its too hard to find a good ICO that will bring to us a good profit  ;)
regards

In my experience, I only have few ICO investments and I had one failure which is with hashcard which turned out to be a scam, they have a great project which is a debit card I believe one of tge reason that they scammed people because they announced binance upfront wherein it is against binance rules.

Regarding my successes, I have two that would be with ETN wherein I easily got 10x my investment during the bull and currently with INS, I didnt sell at ATH but still I didn't regret my decision as they are now on the process of getting a working product.

I am now afraid to invest my money in an ICO project, because my last experience investing in an ICO ended in losing money

I'm not an ICO investor but I'm a holding bunch of tokens I got from different campaigns and sold at good price during price surge last December to February sold most of Eidoo, Bitdegree, Electroneum, Ethlend etc. As of the moment most my holdings plunge to 70% - 90% but still not considering it a fail because it is due to bear month and I believe that project development is more important, it will create value of token or coin in the long run. Real projects will survive and scam project will always fail and pay.

well, I also rarely invest in ICO, but I often hold coins for a long time. That's good enough for me, because I got a pretty high profit in 2017. Well, but for my regret, maybe I have invested 0.1 btc in an ICO which led to a scam.

One of the first many ICO success I experienced was WABI, DRAGONCHAIN , SIMPLE TOKEN & BLUEZELLE. Also I didn't jumped out of the wagon and the winnings I've earned in these ICOs, I also lost during the very long bear market.

That is always one thing when it comes to taking advantage of the market when it is still underpriced and now if Ethereum or any market even finds a bottom, the chances of seeing it increase further is still there, so at the end, it is all about how smart you are and how you are able to quickly detect a project with potentials and key into it immediately.

Right now, ETH is still trying to find a bottom at around $150 - $200 and that is still some pretty big profit as far as I am concerned while some are considering it low at the moment.

No one really knows when investing whether it will turn out greate, and let no one tell you otherwise. What we all do is speculate and guess to see which coin is most likely not to come back and bite us.
I would say that if you buy shilled coins, then you can run into such conclusions. It's also lazy and careless. Do your own research. You just need to basically check two things for a solid coin. One is a good team. Two is a coin with a future/purpose. With those two, you can definitely be positive that what you have there is a good coin to invest in. Check out #Mevu.

I'm more of a hodler type (as you might expect from my name)   :D and while holding I don't think I can yet calculate my losses or wins. It is possible once I sell. No need to look at short term loss or gain while the bigger picture is to hold long time.

I have invested in Aeron ICO a year ago..Since then price has dropped significantly BUT team is going strictly in accordance with the roadmap. So..Price is at the low, but project itself is at the top. So..will figure out if my participation in that ICO was successful.

I have found out they have started very massive airdrop campaign. Im aware it may drop the ARN price in short term perspective  ???

Yes, here is details https://medium.com/@aeronaero/cryptobonusmiles-gleam-io-157d4c1c2641
No, it wont affect the price as team will distribute the Miles ( new token in the ARN ecosystem) so it will be new tradable token and it wont affect the ARn price in any case. it is just the way to make free money

Hm..sounds good enough. Will take part in the contest for sure and deeper investigate what is Aeron and how it works/future plans of project

My ico success stories is i got big profit on Electroneum token
I got 8 x profit
My biggest failure i think, I join selfdrop VIXCORE  I lost  Almost 3 eth haha
i invest on vixcore i think the project will succesfully because my friend "ico addicted" invest 20 eth on vixcore and make me sure the project is a good enough to invest.

Never joined a real presale but 2-3 times bought at first trading day on a first exchange: Cardano, OmiseGo and Bluzelle.

Sold ADA after one of the first real pumps, like x10 or more. Seemed perfectly normal under last years bull run.

Sold n re-bought OMG like 2 times with less luck than ADA, during which it's got pumped several times. Seemed perfectly normal under last years bull run.

BLZ entered market at bear season to come, still sitting on it. Rebought some ADA, OMG again later on.

All three were apparently a great ivestments (especially if sold near ATH) but there was no skill included at all, just luck. I wish I were so warnful in all my investments.

Started first ADA speculation thread in last Oct here. Retrospectively it might be interesting :)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2224412.0

I wonder if some blockchain wizard could get some rough numbers on how much ICO volume was recycled, faked, or unverified, and whether someone could show how the numbers are impossible by looking at the bigger picture. It'd be a lot of work though...

Yes, this would be an interesting thing to see and analyze. That would give a great picture of the ICO ecosystem.

When I was A newbie in investing ICO, I choose an ICO to join, and I got scammed. And untill this day I still never join ICO anymore, maybe untill the market going up and normal

I have seen a lot of fails, the successes are yet to be determined actually. The reason ICOs fail are many. For me one of the main ones is not having a tangible product or service already, something like a prototype. Most just draft a whitepaper and buy a designer with cool artwork, that's it. Also having a great dedicated team of both technical and social expertise goes a long way.. some projects overlook the importance of marketing - but then marketing has to be done at the correct time.
Another reason is having an overzealous discount program and airdrops. Once the ICO hits an exchange the freeloaders dump the coins thus sending the price to sub-satoshi levels.
My sig's coin MeVu has a great balance of all of these. Have a look.

I have many stories of success from the previous years as I entered in crypto world, I used to participate in bounty campaign and invest that ICO at the same time and mostly I always have earned good profit and bounty rewards will soon come to me after a few weeks at ICO end, but suddenly this year I was surprised because my happy moment last year was gone and all this time frustration is always come on me for I get nothing on most bounty I have participated this year.

Are there success stories from this year? The market situation isn't great.

I was truely hoping that Fantom would be one of the 2018 success stories, but so far it's still trading very far under ICO price in USD, and just above ICO price in Eth. Not really a success story.

Well tons of ICO have lead me to 100% of my investment loss
Some even with live product or website which you can play on
One of the notable project is letitride or something like that
where i have almost 1btc worth of the coins and the dev just run damn

this is part of the experience, i suffered a big loss when investing in TBAR titanium bars, ico became a scam after entering the exchange. this made me angry and fed up, but there was an ico that was profitable for me even though it ended up being a scam too, center. centra ico is good but it is a scam. I sell it and get a big profit.

If people were honest you'll find out that most experiences that you are going to get in this thread are negative ones, I have only invested in a single ico and it didn't turn out very well, the project is still in development but it's going to take a lot more than what the developers thought and I haven't made any money out of it, and I have not invested in any other project because I promised to myself that if I lost money in that ico I will never invest in an ico again.

Yes, have been part of a development team as well, and these things take time. If you want to build something great that runs smoothly and works well, then it is going to take time to build. People often overestimate their speed. Also, there are going to be setbacks and people think it is going to be a smooth run, but most likely it won't. ICO projects are no different than any other software development project.

Yes, I see that. A lot of negative experiences. Is that what the ICO market is right now?

Here's a study about ICO space by Boston College. It's called "Digital Tulips? Returns to Investors in Initial Coin Offerings"
Pretty good overview. It was published in May 2018.

LINK to the pdf of the study (https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=881031104121114071075104027025113088037017063054033022103118070092013122096071069066122030022042108012118125125096067089072084016071069044035009084023083086091116085050060091027008112066096115126112124006013082109113029027110116104097101081029084092&EXT=pdf)

What is certain is that my good story when investing in ICO only happened last year, that this year there have also been a number of successful ICOs but unlike iICO which was launched in 2017. And the worst story is when I participated in ICO scams in a row (maybe it's better if I don't mention the name of the project).

If they are scams then why not mention them? I think it would benefit others

My biggest success is Lending coins in 2017 that time I did not know that it was all a scam because that time I'm just a newbie, bought some token on ICO and sell it to other people for like 10x the price, why these guys buy that coin from me? simple they cannot buy it because it will be sold out in just 5min and every they only sell that lending coin every 24hrs and when all people are buying the website will crash, so the chances of buying that coins are very low, the is my story of the golden age of Lending coins, the father of all lending coins is Bitconnect

My best ICO story is free airdrop from some random coin. Look, I don't even remember that I registered to that particular airdrop. At that time I was just randomly signed up to any airdrop that I found. Why? Because back in the days in doesn't take much time or effort to participate in an ICO. Just a google form, no KYC, no social media task, nothing. And then suddenly, when I take a look at my ETH address, I found a token worth more than $1000. LOL can't be happier than that. I immediately sold the token and convert it to BTC.

This must be the airdrop of Ontology. I can remember this one; only had to sign up for the newsletter and the airdrop was evetually worth thousands of dollars. Oh how I miss the bullmarket.

Oh, really? where was I then?  ;D

The more the SEC cracks down on unregistered securities posing as ICOs, the more the atmosphere in $crypto will change. IMO, ICOs will not die, but they will definitely have to take a new form and STOs will play a big role.
I believe this is a good thing for the industry

I think it is great that SEC is doing it actually. It helps to better the reputations of ICO-s. And if we can get those scam ICO-s etc out of the way, or at least decrease the number of them, then it's a win for crypto!

How will the current market situation affect ICO space? I imagine not positively? Are you guys getting into ICO's? Some more fail stories might come up times like this. But I'm positive that it will start getting better eventually. It's just a matter of time imo. Actually times like this can be great to get in, as the prices are low and they can't get much lower. Plus, the next bull-run is more enjoyable  8)

I think that no one will praise projects that began their work in 2018 because the market is falling and it is difficult to assess the potential to analyze in more detail when the market starts to grow and projects start to show themselves

I think that ICO is not a bad thing to make money out of it but one need to have the best ICO project to invest in. For that, you need to have wide research and only then you would be able to recognize nice projects.

I got one bad story of my own now. Was interested in a project that was starting a crypto smartwatch project. But it seems they flew away with the money. Some big big amounts of tokens have been sold on the market under 1000x of the market value and now these tokens are basically worthless.. website is down as well.. not good signs.

the first time I invested in ico neblio, with the price of ico 0.05 $ I bought 2800 neblio and I sold neblio for $ 40 I got a huge profit

Right now there are too many ico who fail and also lie to many people. they are all very disadvantaged by the many ico scams. the funds obtained were large enough to be able to cheat many people

I think lots of people have got burnt and that's why the ICO market is decreasing significantly.

times like this, I would love to hear some more success stories.
any recent ones for anyone?

Rememer the days when ICO's like Bancor could raise 170 million USD in a heartbeat. They have enough funds to last for years. I don't think we will ever see those ICO's again. And maybe that's for the best.

Yes, maybe. I'm sure we will see more of that when the market gets booming again.

I don't think so. Many countries are already implementing regulations for ICO's and/or TGE's. No start-up needs 170 million. It's bullshit and excessive. I don't think it will happen again.

Wow, that's a nice profit.
So you invested $140 and sold for $112k?
If true then amazing!

in my opinion it was very hard for me to buy my first ICO as i had to buy ethereum first and then exchange it and the whole process was very tiresome and hard, in the end i just gave up and quit cause i'd rather invest in alredy existing coins that have a proven track record. many of the new ICO's coming up are scams and its very difficult to know which ones are genuine and which ones are pump and dump schemes. a fair amount of research is required for ICO's where as coins that already have a track record such as ripple (i heard they are signing deals left, right and center) seem like a better investment to me.

There is a significant chance that a product is never launched. Very few successful companies raise a ton of money early on and the best companies iterate at faster pace than competitors. Of course I don't know the details about each project mentioned here, so just speaking about general trends.

My most successful investment in the Docademic (MTC) project is that I don’t have any coins and I sold them at the peak of their value. Today - it would not be the most successful.

A story that is very inspiring is indeed for many people. we know that nowadays there are many people that I can say are successful from cryptocurrency and they give their stories a lot to be able to get enthusiasm for us

You may not be able to analyze some of the projects that you follow that you don't really understand. so the project you are following does not really give you a big advantage.

Wise choice, not many people can say that they sold it at the peak.




Yes. Also, the ICO-space is in pretty bad shape. Even projects who have a great idea and a trustworthy team do fail. Just because people have burnt themselves and don't want to invest into ICO-s.

ICOs are silently dying down and not getting as many funds as they used to. Is anyone here still actively browsing through ICOs and getting involved and investing?

there are some successful ico now, this doesn't necessarily mean that all ico are bad for investment. in fact some ico managed to get their hardcap. it could be proof if there are still ico who really get the attention of investors.