Bitcoin Forum

In the last two years more then half of ICO's was shut down or tagged at scams

There is currently an intense debate raging within the crypto community. This debate is centered around the emergence of a new method of raising money for blockchain projects, this method is called a Security Token Offering (STO).

Some people believe that STOs, will eventually completely replace the original Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Others believe that STOs in their current form actually take away from a lot of the original positives that crowdfunding through an ICO provided.

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Here in thisSTO guide (https://guerrillabuzz.com/all-you-need-to-know-about-security-token-offerings-sto/), I explained everything about STO's the differences and regulations regarding it and why it so good to the crypto world

What would you think will happen in the next few years, STO is just another faze or it will be the final form? 

if indeed STO is a better method than ICO.
and if the STO method is the best way to prevent some fraud from happening, I strongly agree with this step.

STO is definitely the next logical step but will it be enough to stop the scams are a question. First of all like I always say not all "scams" are actually scams, ICO is a thing that requires a lot of luck and expertise and some of the people who started coins actually bankrupted the funds and failed to create a good coin but because they failed and went away people called them "scams" where as they were just incompetent people. STO will at least have a higher entry barrier where scammers and incompetent people will be eliminated a bit, not all of them but a lot of them.

Right now, ANYONE can start a new coin and create a new ICO with the STO thankfully that number will decrease and if a person wants to scam people it will take a big more time and effort, and if you are incompetent and a failure it will take a while to be even a STO which still elaminates the "everyone can start a new coin" level to "some can start a new coin" levels.

STO is not a good solution, investors still want anonymous investments. I think instead of switching to STO it's better to make regulations to tighten the ICO project launch

The idea is good, but can small companies, with the help of STO, raise funds for development?? Steve jobs built his first computer in the garage and nobody sponsored it. ICO is good because anyone can turn their idea into a successful project, without any outside interference and raise money with the help of people who believe in it. I think that the ICO will not die, but simply change.

Don't think that there will not be scams in the STO space, too. There will be, and there will be a lot. Not blatant scams, though, because more regulation is forced upon. Think of more sophisticated and veiled scams. ICO examples - EOS, Steemit.

Yeah i agree with you on that i think fully registered and licensed stos are the need of the hour that not only will provide you real ownership to investors in the comoany but also share the profits and last but not the least due to regulations chances of scam are also very low.

In this case, I am interested in the question of how the role of bounty hunters will change with STO. If it does not change, then you can try with STO.
However, I believe that the ICO is still early to bury. They also have a right to exist, especially after states regulate it and frauds in these ICO projects are also significantly reduced.

I never say it, but you must admit that is indeed an improvement of the current system

I am skeptical.

Im sure there will be proper viable projects funded by STO's but I think
there will be plenty of scammers out there who will use it as another
weapon to relieve people of their funds.

I got a bit burned with some ICO's but i feel relieved and privileged that
bitcoin and some established alts have remained strong for me so I
wi continue to believe in those.

The method of gathering funds seems irrelevant to me, I do not care how new projects get their funding the great problem are the scammers and the developers that have no idea what they are doing and since I do not see that changing at all the same that is happening to icos now will happen to this new model, but many people like me have learned their lesson and I will never invest in an ico or any project that is asking for free money just to develop something that in the long run may not work.

Yes 2017/18 isn't a very good year for ICO's  as many scam ICO occupied the world crypto market. But we see that STI is just coming by to relegate ICO, but to me, I don't think it's STO's that can stop this scamming thing but plainly that crypto needs regulations.

Cryptomarket is very volatile, easy to manipulate & easy to make scams by fake ICOs because of lack of proper regulation. Security Token offering will help surely to tackle the scam problems as they will have to go through the security laws & the market manipulation will also be reduced significantly as there will be separate exchange platform to trade specially security tokens.

I agree with you that ICO regulations is one of the solutions to at least filter and tighten the list of ICOs in the market. With rules and regulations layed out on the floor, somehow weak developer team and nonsense projects will not be allowed to do crowdfunding. The regulations is focus on the team and project, not on the investors.

If it will become the new trend and investors embrace they have to pass the Howey test of SEC and I doubt if all ICO can do that, only the best project can pass the test, but my real concern is the future of bounty hunting if STO become popular in cryptocurrency investing.

One thing I can't really understand nowdays is why people never are left to their own decisions? why does someone have to protect everyone?
in a sense, it's a bit like stupid people (not just in crypto) who fall for scams, causes regulations and therefore problems for the normal people.
kinda like how every single service nowadays forces using phone authentication etc..

Everything is constantly evolving. I'm not fully convinced STOs are even a step forward. One thing I am sure is that a lot of people think they are so we'll see a lot more of them. There is still always room for improvement. Nothing should ever be the final form. STOs will come and then they'll go and something will supersede them.

That's possible we cannot continue with this current trend investors are losing money and losing their trust to ICO soon all ICO however good is the project will get no funding, because of investors losing trust and market not moving at all, we need a big action now something that could change everything.

the risk is still the same, just like ICO's, if you don't know when to buy and when to rid of them, you will lose your money. Those who are advertising STO's are the same who was behind ICO's, replacing a name that has bad reputation with new face, it's the same old game and old players.

We cannot ignore that there are many scams in ICO projects that make every investor or participant get the big risks. However, so far, this is the only way to come up with the new project promoted. If the STO is much better and can decrease the scams, why not? But, give us the proof and solution.

Startups on the cryptocurrency market have long been regulated because, due to the fact that they can do anything, we lose a lot of money

Your submissions is not correct as it cannot be backed up with a  technical knowledge,  the bearish market of 2018,has a negative impact on most ICO ,several good project has a crash in price, far below there ICO price, that does not denote that they are scamm project.

but if we need anonymous investment to be implemented as a whole, it actually makes the blockchain not transparent, and will make more problems than as a solution. anonymously can be used as an optional. I also didn't agree STO can be a solution for this.

I don't see any advantages for STO in general for small investors. STOs are known for giving advantages to big investors and as a result disadvantages to small investors. It's obiously why ICOs were developed: giving very small investors a chance to accumulate tokens and a chance for making some decent profit.
STO is going into the wrong direction, away from small investors and reloading misfunction of previous investment opportunities we know from general founding projects. Sad to see it  :'(

I am sure that bright minds will still figure out how to make fraudulent projects and will earn even on STO!

Interesting information, and a really important issue that needs attention. I also wonder what will happen next with the ICO project market, it will continue to be relevant and profitable for investors, or STO will be a replacement. In any case, the market for ICO projects will not be the same and I am sure that it is changing right now.

Yeah. This is right most of the icos which was created on 2018 are scam or failed. For many reasons. The ICO hype is already gone. One thing almost all the icons was getting their funds and promise to develop their project. But most of them after some time stop developing or just vanished or failed to deliver a good project. So for these resons ICO are not good anymore. Instead of ICO there are a different type of thing called STO. At these time there  are some space for STO based project. Maybe this year will be STO projects first rum

Security tokens are more secured rather than utility tokens, we all know the difference between the two, but talking about utility ICO's, yes i believe that the previous ICO's most of which are scams and a fraud, scammers and fraudsters use this means to create a bunch of ICO in order to gain more money, investors should be aware of it, at some sort, security tokens could not be really an answer to this problem i think,it should be proper regulation in order to disseminate the scam ico's.

Thank you for such an interesting topic. I've missed this new cycle of the development of investments in blockchain projects! I've run over this text so far, and I consider it a good idea which may lead to new growth!

The statistics are really very sad, because now the best thing that can happen is the introduction of a regulator or the creation of open source software. That is, platforms that today will still have real opportunities to find scammers.

I won't go as high as 80%, but what I observed in the space is that a lot of these developers are good but lack the business side of things, if you developer a platform and no one is willing to use it then it is better not to investing time and resources doing it in the first place. As regard STOs people need to tread carefully here and understand the pros and cons before investing into any STOs because they also come with their baggage also

This is quite possible, because ICO cannot exist forever and they have to come to replace something!

New problems and new innovations will always emerge, as before when the Escrow era was very widely used, then STO now appeared.
In my opinion it is good to make improvements from the way that was previously indicated by fraud. In the future, maybe there will be more innovations that will improve STO and so on.

I guess we will see over time, but we are adding to good place

No, I don't agree that most ICO investors wanted to be anonymous in the first place. Remember that many projects have already implemented the KYC requirements and many investors followed the policy well. If there is a way that can protect them from so many scams, many will be so willing to step in. The current ICO system will eventually die all because investors are now uninterested to be throwing money into air and get a balloon in return. When an investor experienced money burning, he will be dismayed and will not be returning into the table unless something good can be offered to him. This is the big reason we need to demand something that is better and transparent from start to finish and stop this non-sense of using the blockchain and cryptocurrency to fool people out of their hard-earned money. It is quite a sad thing that we let these scammers take advantage of this good platform and not offer protection to the many investors.

Security token offerings must have license into selling securities. Unless the STO organizer has license from all jurisdictions where they want to sell, it's illegal from very first transaction.

In other words - without a license from proper authority, STO's are scams.

Let's hope that STO will really bring the benefits that they expect from them otherwise it will be just a rename ICO!

I have been taking a close look at STOs in recent times and I see the merits of what you just said, it seems STOs are doing quite well even with the present state of the market.

Statistics really does not lie. I think that these are very big problems for the global economy, but in general today there is a really right direction for development. This is of course STO, but I think that there are holes there too.

It's definitely not a final form. We can't even imagine what will be in 5-10 years, everything could be significantly changed in comparison with nowadays technologies we used to. STO is just the next step forward and I suppose there will be many more of them.

I hope that STO will be a big step forward, and not a trampling on the spot which we saw in 2018. However, if the bearish trend prevails on the market throughout the year, I don’t think that STO will be able to greatly influence the situation. We'll see.

STO is the more secured way of holding a token sale and I believe it would help to protect crypto investors from different art of scam projects. It is a good improvement and I hope there would be less fraud projects on the market.

I support STO. but if we pay attention there are still many new projects that use ICO. for the beginning, maybe STO has not been so popular because there are still many investors who think that STO has too many rules.

I hope STO will be a better solution for the cryptocurrency market and investors participating in ICO projects. 2017 and 2018, there have been many projects that are scams and it has worsened the cryptocurrency market a lot, many people think crypto is a scam because of these ICO projects.

STO is very good for every ICO and for investors. People should understand that they are not deceived. I think any changes necessarily lead to a better result. The only problem is a very long implementation of this change.

Well we can't really say how would STOs work in the crypto world. As far as I understand, the security token a STO is going to provide must be trust worthy and profitable in the market.
If it fails in that then the whole point of launching a STO would be diminished. STOs does have a better scope than ICO in my point of view but then it also depends on many number of factors whether a STO will be successful or not. The survival of STOs is in it's own hands.

Can someone explain to me what are STO's and why are better than ICO's ? Are more stable ? Are they offering extra safety for their customers ? It seems that most of you belive that STO's are the next big step regarding to projects on crypto and blockchain so this made me curious to go and search about STO's

It seems to me that the difference ze7 is waiting for such projects only in a more rigid provision of personal data by investors and project participants. As far as I understand the comma. This system will not eliminate fraud, but on the contrary will toughen the provision of KYC for users of cryptocurrency.

Security Token offering? They're  probably looking for a way to mt or  to regulate these things?
 Well, as long as it doesn't violate the ideals of cryptocurrency or tries to replace ico.
I think ico is great, just needs to be  strengthened,  more  decentralized, make  funds raising hard for scams, improve anonymity,etc

Yeh we all know than market of ICOs isn’t still regulated. That’s why there is an enormous amount of scam projects. STO’s will try to change the situation. People don’t believe in the new projects anymore.

I've heard this theory,but I can say that 80% of SCAM and scammers,and the percentage of 20-40%,but the majority just because of the market,and manipulations get away from it,although initially was really a working team,and developed product worthy,so not the fact that STO next step will be!

I can't imagine STOs, in this case only big whales would enter this game, ordinary people will buy just on exchanges.
I don't think that a lot of STOs will appear

Nothing is going to change, as long as there is money to be made scammers are going to find a way to try to get to your money, what we really need is that developers are more serious about their projects and they present their ideas in a more professional way so we can more easily distinguish who is for real and who is just trying to just get money but we also need investors to improve as well and not to invest millions on dollars in an ico with just a website to show to them.

Security Token offerings are looking like the next big things after ICOs. I've been seeing several posts about it recently. While I'm not a huge fan of regulations for Cryptocurrencies, I feel Its a welcome development and should help curb the excessively amount of scams. On the other hand, ICOs did provide gains which I'm not sure STOs would come close to achieving.