Bitcoin Forum

Hey crypto mates! Let's take a stroll down memory lane and chat about the wild ride of ICOs – the good, the bad, and the "what-were-we-thinking" moments. Remember those ICO mania days when every token seemed like a golden ticket? Fast forward to Reality Check City.

Share your war stories, victories, and facepalms. What lessons did you learn from the ICO rollercoaster? Maybe your crystal ball predicted the next big thing, or perhaps you've got scars to prove otherwise. No shame, we've all been there!

i have never had the experience of joining an ico program before, but from several threads i read that in 2018, quite a lot of crypto projects launched ico programs and quite a lot of people joined the program. at that time, many people made high profits just by investing in an ico program or joining a campaign, but many also lost money because many campaigns ended up being scams and taking away the investors' money.

maybe because there were so many programs that were scams and the drop in the value of these altcoins along with the fall in the price of bitcoin, caused investor confidence to drop drastically and in the end this ico trend did not continue until now.

this is quite unfortunate because from what i saw, this ico program was quite a good thing because at that time quite a lot of people believed in crypto projects. but because of the increasing number of scammers, developers who are running away, and investors who are starting to withdraw, ico programs are no longer attractive, in fact no one trusts ico programs anymore.

hopefully we can repeat this trend, but on a more trusted platform so that it will prevent scammers and increase investor confidence.

I was never a part of any ICOs back in those days. I had heard a lot about them as many good crypto were launched through initial coin offering. Some are still preferring the ICO process but hardly get any success due to it bad reputation. Today most investors prefer IEO or IDO for early investment into a new project. The reason is that scam can be avoided and delay in listing is also avoided.

Oh, yeah! This is taking me through memory lane remembering those glorious (and later sad) days of ICOs. I was a noob that year, 2017. How I felt every ICO I managed to get into was the hidden treasure. Now I know better. It was a year that saw a preponderance of lending coins birthed through ICOs. Well, even with mixed feelings looking back now (of how I could've saved myself), I still want to take the lessons learned from all that. We've a modern version of ICOs now as IDOs. Yes, some people may argue that there's a difference as the latter is done on Dexs but my point is that there's no guarantee that an IDO will also make you money too. For an investor, what matters is ROI.

Anyway, to be honest, I've profited more from IDOs than I did with ICOs. Most times what I do with IDOs is wait for a dump after listing if I can't get an allocation because of the tier I'm on. Of course, experience has taught me that projects always dump after listing. Yes, they surely do. Just wait for that dump moment (most times, below listing price). Do this too for any project with a hype. Once you aren't fast to get in before listing, don't rush and buy once it's listed. Give it time (days and some times even weeks) to dump well.

I think the most important lesson to be learnt from the fall of ICO's and other fundraising/crowdfunding schemes is that whatsoever that lacks utility/use cases can only last for a short term. With schemes like this there'd be a few people who would make ROI from it, but the majority will get burnt; it is a rinse and repeat process. People still invest in new projects and engage in "rebranded" forms of ICO, so it is never going away and even those who have lost so much on it still jump on the next one that is launched.

ICOs was the major means of getting money for crypto projects all that you need to do back then was have the idea and team ready to work with you and then hire advertisers and you are good to go as many people will see the project and like to be part of the early investors who will enjoy it when the project excel, until when the ICO was later turn to means of scamming investors and number of successful ICO keep on reducing day after day until the scam industry completely took over it.

ICO was fun although I can’t remember investing in any coin through ICO but they I have seen many who have both benefited and lost grate investment to it due to some presale snd ICO price and listing price are not always close to each other which make me wonder why not wait for the token to get listed before buying instead of buying high as earlier investor and end up selling low to traders.

Back inna those days when ICO was making serious wave some project never seems to do pretty well but one painful thing i don't like about them then was just after making huge purchase some of does project telegram group do restricts people from posting in their telegram group in order to keep investors silent about their investments. Then I wasn't that smart enough to know and select some reasonable projects to invest rather was jumping project after project and that was how i was incurring much lost after the lesson learnt from there, we now fast forward to IDO, IEO after discovering that investors has started reducing interest to invest in ICO.

It was then we discovered IDO & IEO although it was a lesson i won't forget because if then i was so Clever enough i could had used that opportunity to filled my bags of bitcoin knowing too well that bitcoin wasn't that high in price. In my general view all those means was a tricky way used to extort investors their hard earned money, probably there are people who hold bitcoin then due to those altcoin they sold to invest their money at the end they got nothing.

What a ride it was! I remember the days when every new token felt like a ticket to financial freedom, the excitement, the FOMO, and the endless possibilities. There were moments of triumph when I seemed spot on, yet there were also those forehead-slapping moments where I found myself wondering.

One lesson that stands out for me is the importance of thorough research. It's not just about jumping on the hype train; it's about understanding the project, the team behind it, and the real-world problem it aims to solve. The days of blindly throwing funds at every shiny new ICO are long gone.

ICO when firstly introduced were super hyped and every one just jumped in raising the price of the ICOed coin multiple of times. But as the number of platforms doing the ICOs and the number of ICOs increased, there was no longer money for every of them, so a lot of them failed even to sustain pre-ICO prices. This period of lackluster after the hype made many people stop trusting in ICO.
But ICO are not dead, even today good ICO from reliable projects are yielding good profits for early investors and they still are a huge thing in crypto.

Haha, you remind me about my ETH address which have many of zero worth tokens from 2017.
Crazy days, even a fictional and weird projects able to collect much money at that time.
Pump and dump become a normal thing, daily traders can become rich or poor in less than a day.

However, more people also start to know and learn about crypto because of the ICO madness 2016-2017.
The craziest thing I did before buy any token back in 2017 = I was rare to read the whitepaper but I only check who is the advisors of the project lol.

I will not share war stories but I want to share the lessons learnt. The lesson says not everything is gold that glitters. Every hype made some millionaires, especially those who have adopted at a very early stage. But those hypes died faster than expected.

The similar kind of learning we get from the NFT madness. It has made multiple millionaires during its early stage. But it died faster than ICO menace.

Never jump into something which doesn't bring any value to the table.

Just like some people here, I've never been part of or directly involved with an ICO, that's probably because I joined and jumped into the crypto side after the ICO craze was over. I should be grateful for that situation, because if I had jumped into crypto at that time, maybe I would have been the luckiest person or even the worst person.

Based on stories from people I have met in real life or online, the ICO craze at that time was truly over the top, the majority of people thought that all projects holding ICOs would be successful in the future. Not without reason, these projects promise great hopes if seen from the Whitepaper (Utilities, Roadmap).

My only successful investment is related to the ICO of the Link project in 2017. And the $500 invested at that moment could have turned into $75,000 today if I had been able to hold it all these years. But as it often happens, I sold Link too early, doubling the amount of my investment

One lesson is that this is like the gold rush whenever you see projects that are on the media, you don't think of them that they're going to stay longer. And from there, all you have to do is to keep them for a moment and when you are in profit, that's the time that you should find another one. There were really a lot of roller coaster rides with the ICO and those who have been into it and made lots of money liked it.

I have no crystal balls and never predicted anything but it seems that we always keep on changing, what I mean with we is that the market keeps on changing and we always get to see something new here. So past with the ICOs, the IEOs and then so on, right? And that made every investor believe that most of the next trends are going to be profitable but many have speculated it wrongly and the bear have definitely exterminated most of them badly.

Oh, I remember back then 2017 when I was new in crypto and the ICO was hyped at that moment.
But to be honest, I gained a lot of profit during those days most especially the airdrop and investing ICO, not like these days it's more on hype made by the community and there's no utility.  Not like successful ICOs were transparent about their team, project details, and development progress.

After ICO, there are IEOs, DeFi, NFTs, and now DAOs. (forgot meme projects)
So I'm thinking now which one of them becomes worth it in the future.

Cryptocurrency was a major breakthrough for finance and most especially in the digital world back then of course time has passed and now almost everyone knows about cryptocurrency and is even participating in it of course not everyone understands and accepts crypto but the point is crypto has become a concept that somewhat everyone is familiar with

Now there are lots of altcoins trying to be the next big thing and there is just much congestion compared to back then wherein if a team was able to launch a project it must mean it’s legit

Fortunately I was never involved with ICOs it might be a regret but I came across crypto quite late already

ICO is the most profitable thing if we become bounty hunters, not investors who buy the coins because as bounty hunters there is no risk, even if we don't sell it at the highest price, it's still not a problem, but as investors we will always hope to get big profits so we always try to wait until the price can rise very high, sometimes greed makes us reluctant to sell even though it has provided a profit of more than 10x because we think the price will continue to rise but realize that the developer has failed to fulfill what was promised in the whitepaper so the price slowly turns and becomes trash or hasn't the opportunity to sell it.
In my experience, maybe only 30-40% of all the ICOs I participated in made a profit and the rest were just losses that didn't even have a chance to sell because the promise of entering a major exchange never happened.

Every sector has a transional form and ico represent that in the crypto space. Ico despite the bad sides at the end gave birth to several great projects whom we all refers to as top 100 projects this days.
To be honest ico did a lot to help kick start the crypto space. Through it several projects where able to raise money to develop their projects.
Nowadays, it is VCs and LPs that are trending and providing funds to projects for startup,  who knows what will be the next trend in few years.

The one among the CEOs that made the highest news is the exchange owner who is still facing law suit and possible sentence right now, who own a token that we saw it wide range of dip when the case of bankruptcy faced the CEO and the campany, all this are a reflection of what the cryptocurrency market is and how trustless it is, and not good to trust and token or centralised platforms, this is because many of them have failed to reach the promised and broken down along the way, and if and when that happens, it negative impact will Rob on all the projects that sourand then.
We have a whole list of them who have raised and failed at some certain point in time and new and young CEOs should take note of that factors and try to manover them when the time comes while growing their platforms.

In the world of crypto, we can never expect all projects will stay long (or forever). We remember those days when ICO/IEO was hype, most of us enjoyed such time but it never stayed long and another set of projects came and made the same trend. That is why if we are looking for long-term investment, Bitcoin is really the best coin to choose.

What happens to them and with those projects following ICO like NFT, P2E, and Defi, will simply tell us that we have to keep updated and must be aware of the situation. A project that has been hyped could never stay long which is why they are just good for short-term deals and sell them when it is still at its peak.

For me, ICO is extremely dangerous and risky. Before, it was really easy to do ICO on any random projects, and a lot of people especially those new people in the market were getting scammed.
Compared now, investors, even retail or new, are now careful and these projects are at the next level already because they are now competing with each other to bring the best especially if you are in IDO, IEO, launch pool, etc. There are already a lot of ways in token/coin offerings for investors that are more regulated and safer.

My memories of the beginning of the ICO were quite impressive and then chaotic. There was a time when I only did a few steps to participate in ICO and then made a very good profit, but then the mixture of some forms of mlm (bitcoinnect) brought a completely different atmosphere. Looking back, the process of making money was simple and losing money was also simple. It was during this time that I accumulated investment experience. Balancing the risk/return factor is the basic factor so that better results can be expected. The journey is not too short, but basically the current "forms of capital raising" are just upgraded versions of the past, and at first everything seemed quite exaggerated with profits but then the saturation.

It used to be so good until everything turned bad because the ICO industry has exhausted itself from too many bad projects and infiltration from scammers the ICO days are over and there will never be another big thing coming from the ICO.
A lot of my friends who are early birds of the best projects that come from ICO have made a lot of profit until the scammers find their way here, creating fake and duplicate projects, so many investors lost money investing in ICO, they are wiser now and they know what to look for projects who are launching their ICO,Investors now prefer investing on IDO and STO.

Hello! ICO times were truly exciting, but also quite wild at times. I remember how every new project promised a revolution in its field, and investors were ready to invest in everything that blockchain had to offer. Many of them were quite successful, but of course there were those that attracted attention with their pump-and-dump style activities.
From personal experience, a memorable “what were we thinking” moment was when I invested in a project that promised to revolutionize social media on the blockchain. And it even seems to have caught the attention of some celebrities. But when difficulties began, the project team was unable to cope with them, and everything went downhill. This experience taught me to be more cautious and study projects in detail before investing.

Back then, they were reliable and they created lots of opportunities both for investors and bounty hunters, but when the scammers and crooks got themselves the way to create their own ICOs, that's when darkness began an opportunity turned into nightmares for most of those investors who trust the projects they invested but it turned out to be fake and has no value in other words shit coins. It goes like that for most of the altcoins back then, I was lucky enough to invest in real ones and promoted others that are actually paying and have some good projects that were successful in the past few years.

Does anyone remember Arch's Tent Boat by BTCarchitect and ARCHnetwork.

The thread is still there but unfortunately the pictures are long gone.

That was my favourite.

The ones I got as initial Coin Offering (ICO) were all lost. How they lost from my wallet? I bought new phone so I sold my old and I installed everything in my old phone to the New one and I imported all the seed phrases from the different wallets and only for me to realized that one of the seed phrase is not working. And I lost everything in wallet.

So also let the coins go since they are not up to even $10 dollars yet but the it is appreciating every month. If I got it and hodle it for like 10 years to come I would have making enough cash from it.

The year 2018 was the golden era for the ICO and people made tons of money as well in that period but after that ICO market never came up from the death lock and people had their belief even in 2021 that ICOs can make them money but really projects took more aggressive marketing strategies and exchange launchpads came into the game which destroyed and left nothing for ICOs anymore.

We all have our opinions and they do differ compared to the main task we have on our hands. Initial Coin Offering (ICO) are high-risk investments in cryptocurrency and I wouldn't advised anyone close to me to invest in ICO without having a background checkup on the project, because they're numerous in the market that gives our promises and at the end of the day, these teams behind ICO projects failed to complied to their promises and causes major losses prior to investors accounts, most top whales investors end up liquidating their account for certain projects because they prioritize on earning massively from a single project, forgetting to check the negative side if the ICO doesn't worn out.

Well, my experience it quite great, I earn much during that time. I'm not sure but maybe I was lucky to choose the projects that it booms during the bull season and make a sell perfectly. Of course, I was aware that many of the ICO projects turn into scams as well but because I never held any of them which is why I end making money, unlike the others.

The lesson: don't hold altcoins for a long time but rather make a play on its movement. Don't be too greedy but rather enjoy some percentage of earnings or else, we gonna miss it.

It is very great to remember those days but yeah, have to accept that not all projects stay long and profitable, they also turn to lowkey and ignored because other projects have appeared and are more appealing. I'd see how practical we are now, we took what is in the hype, took advantage of it, and threw it off once benefited.

ICO was been part of my crypto life, I've been a bounty participant since that time and can't deny that most of us had earned money from them. In fact, can't imagine one of my coins had pumped more than 1000%, that is really surprising. But yes, can't deny the fact that not all of them are having such overwhelming price increases some are scams also which until now it stuck in my wallet.

I remember too. It was the time where you could make hundreds of Dollars a day just by sigining up on ICOs to get community tokens or for sharing the projects on social media. It was insane. Almost each token skyrocket shortly after release. But it was clear that this couldn't go on forever. And so the disillusionment came very quickly. I would say that 99% of the projects launched back then no longer exist today.

That's the keyword about how scary it is, "the next big thing". When someone tells you that and endorses a project, you have to think of it many times because you'll never know if that person is telling you the truth.

Most of them are but during 2016 ICOs, I'd say that it was the batch that many projects became successful but yeah, they're like temporal success and then eventually got dissolved by the market's new trends.

if the ico that binance does in this case is called lanuchpad, always the price after increasing the price skyrockets many times the price of the ico.
But if outside binance ico2 that is done, for example those who do bounty campaigns seem to be very quiet. so I rarely follow its progress.

I didn't have any big investments back then but I did profit from quite a few for a bit. I was quite lucky since the few ICOs I participated in at the start were pretty legitimate, so after taking a break from it for a couple of months I went back and thought the same would happen for any ICO I went on. Surprise surprise, my wallet just got filled with zero value tokens after a couple of months lmao. It was rather devastating to me since I didn't expect it to change that much.

For the next big thing who knows? I think NFT was the next big thing after ICO but after NFT we haven't really seen anything else yet.

We have all learnt from our mistakes and now is the best time to utilize our experience and makes it work for us.
Some of us might have had different problems from the start and losing of funds due to the problem of making the wrong decisions that never suit us in making profits for ourselves. Many of the ICOs projects are no where to be found, this is a eye opener that whatever decisions we are making in the crypto sphere, we don't have to be too confidence or relax because anything can happen anytime.

Soon, we're going to see that most of the NFT projects and layer type of blockchains are nowhere to be found. But I am not saying that all of them are going to be gone but most of them and the best ones shall remain. This is what we always see in the market, the best ones stay and the bad ones are being eliminated and being forgotten until they're no longer liquid and have lost a lot of their volume.

I guess that I may have participated in an ICO project, it has really been long as IEO came with a lot of advantages you wouldn’t even remember ICO. ICO most times resulted in teams that wouldn’t launch anymore. IEO on the other hand gives that guarantee that it will be listed on the exchange that it is being hosted in not too long time, so this way you do not worry as you would in ICO. IEO has a lot more features that it used to knock down ICO before others came in.

In my case I only invested in an ico and it failed, it did not turn into a scam, it was just that the aims of the developers were too high and they were unable to make their vision a reality, however I was never really blinded by the promise of the icos at the time, I thought that project was one of the few that actually had potential and decided to invest in it.

But at the same time I told to myself that if my investment in that coin failed, as it did, I will ignore icos and new projects from that moment on, since it became obvious I did not had the skills to pick apart the good projects from the bad ones.

I would not say ICOs are dead. I think they may be coming back.

ICOs got a bad name due to the amount of them turning out to be scams and failures. I think the scam part can be taken out of the equation if you are smart enough to do your own research before investing in an ICO. As fas as the failure part goes: IPOs fail just as often (I would think). So the risk of investing in a new venture is just as big as the reward. If a new business starts booming, you could make a lot of money.

The key to ICO investing is not to put all your eggs into one basket and to do your own research. Use your own brain.

Thats really it. 

Well the mere fact that investing on ICO is totally risky and might poses some funds loss. Well losing is part og the game but if you can keep your sane with this, then you could survive any of those hard decision on investing on ICO. Still ICO are quite good if you are in the right platform. But avoid some making their ICO available to themselves cause possibly a rug could happened.

It's true that it's even more risky than investing with altcoins that already have a name in the market. but it cannot be denied, there are actually still some ICOs that are well made and can run until they achieve success. but even the investors are now starting to be reluctant to look at ICOs, they are more looking at memecoins as a high-risk investment.

The crypto currency world is an ever evolving one. Back then it was ICOs but these days we now have IDOs and presales. And there is still no guarantee that you are going to make money from an IDO.

Yeah. it surprises me to see that there are still some projects that prefer to do an ICO, even knowing very that ICO era is long gone. and every ICO now will 100% fail. but these projects still do ICO and expect people to invest in their project
I tell you what, these are all scam projects, they don't have any budget for their project and to run an IDO in a reputable exchanges, so they try to do ICO and expect people to fall for them.
A Legit Cryptocurrency project would not do ICO at this age of Crypto.
Thinking about OLD ICO era, brings a lot of good and bad memories, what a rollercoster ride that was.

I still can't forget those days ICO never worked well in this project. When this project came, I may have invested a lot of my hard earned money in this project without realizing it. I lost a lot by investing so I will never forget this project. I learned a lot from this project in ICO that never do things well. It is not necessary to invest money without knowing it because the possibility of loss is high.