I agree that right now would probably not be the greatest time frame for the ICO considering the market drama with BTC. Things should be more stable in a month. I personally will be ready either way.
The drama never seems to stop. Korea. China. Some big news story. More Korea. Let's just forget about Twitter as that's drama on top of drama.
On another note : I am actually a fan of straight PoW coins (or PoS) with a fair premine for development, founders, and promotion instead of using the ICO model. This completely avoids most regulation issues with ICOs. But then you have no funds to work with unless the coins attains value. I'm not sure if Chimaera could be created in this fashion but other coins have done it and reached billion dollar plus market caps and created functioning systems.
Good points.
There are some coins that didn't have a pre-mine and were good, but... they're often either gone or relegated to the crypto-history dustbin of distant memory and obscurity. Development takes time and effort, and everyone has bills to pay.
For actual crypto projects, the ICO route can be a fantastic way to launch a good product/project. Right now it has the obvious problem of being diluted with a huge amount of noise and very little signal. Everyone and their grandmothers have jumped on the ICO bandwagon, which makes it much more difficult to get any traction for real crypto projects.
I think I found this one of the funnier tidbits in recent news:
http://fortune.com/2018/01/02/hooters-bitcoin-blockchain-cryptocurrency/Chanticleer is using Mobivity’s blockchain-operated platform to create the cryptocurrency-based loyalty program.
Loyalty programs for publicly traded companies don't need a blockchain. They're inherently centralized anyways, so decentralization only adds on the negatives of decentralization with none of the advantages. Or, at least I can't see any strong advantage (technical advantage that is), other than perhaps, like, well... hey... a 50% jump in stock price is pretty sweet.
I don't know if it's realistic for projects to get launched the way they used to. Things have changed a lot. I've heard rumours of some projects spending ungodly amounts to get listed on some exchanges, which really is the most important thing for a project that launches with zero funds.