What is ICO actually?

[Lafaka]

What is actually ICO? Is this a project? Or it is a currency?

[Velkro]

sold at a very low price before coming to the main exchange. Those who buy coins at that time, they are benefitted later.

Most of the time, they are worth nothing and never appear on any exchange on any serious one.
So anything people buy, they throwing money out of window.

[logfiles]

ICO in full is Initial Coin Offering.
It is the latest way of fundraising for Startups or projects where minted digital tokens or coins are offered to investors in exchange for their fiat or top cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ether or Litecoin.
This is done in anticipation that the value of the token offered to the investor/buyer/funder will rise in future when the demand for the token rises thus the investor also gets to realize profits in future when they trade it off.

More info on ICOs
- Tokenization: The world of ICOs
- What Is An ICO?
- What Is an ICO? | Bitcoin Magazine

[virendarnagpal]

Some people want to start a business but do not have enough funds.  These entrepreneurs were getting funds by getting Bank loans or by issuing shares of their company to general public.  But now they can also issue coins to the investors at price fixed by them.  This is called Initial Coin offering.  
So there is one team behind the project which is in need of money; issues coins (digital currency) to the investors.  Investors may get returns (negative or positive) in future.
Currently most of the coins are being sold below their ICO price because of bearish trend in the market.
Many ICOs have proven to be scam also.  So before investing one must carefully check whether the funds invested will be safe or not?  
As the returns are high so the risk is also high.  So get ready to loss the money invested and on the other hand may get huge profits.

[Manuel Schenkhuizen]

What is actually ICO? Is this a project? Or it is a currency?

ICO is short for Initial Coin Offering, it is derived from the term IPO (Initial Public Offering).
At the time of the initial release, the issuer can choose to sell their crypto for a limited time. The process of this limited sale is called ICO.
But many of the current ICOs are scams, so if you are interested in ICO, then you must be careful.
In my opinion, the safest way to invest in crypto is to buy bitcoin. The risk of ICO is very high.

[Distinctin]

What is actually ICO? Is this a project? Or it is a currency?

It's a crowd funding, it's a new way of attracting investors now, it is open to the public unlike in the typical way where for selected investors only.
We also have selected investors which they called us private investors but they still run an ICO to attract the public and gain public support.
This is actually good but we investors should be careful in choosing where and which to invest.

[encycrypto]

Imagine you think that you can accomplish a goal but the biggest obstacle in between is the lack of funding. For this, you'll need some crowd funding and in return you'll have to offer something to those people who participate in the crowd funding. This is ICO, if we talk about a project related to coin!

[joniboini]

ICO will only make sense if your project requires additional/new token/coins to work. Ironically, most ICO design their tokens/coins usage horribly, as if as long as they can offer some tokens for their contributors/investors they can do an ICO. If you see an ICO that design their tokens only as transaction fees on their platform only, it is very likely they don't need ICO in the first place.

[Gershonxer]

ICO stands for Initial Coin Offering. Take ICO similar to ICO but the difference is that most funds contributed via ICO are mostly with cryptocurrencies. When ICOs are conducted, tokens or should I say cryptocurrencies are issued out to investors of ICO. Based of classifications of ICO, tokens issued out can either be utility token or security tokens (take it a shares/equity of a company).
I would recommend you research more on YouTube or websites.

[troublingchatting]

Initial Coin Offering, basically you invest money on a project and they give you coins/tokens in return. If the project is successful your stash of coins will be valued more and more.

[logitechwow]

ICO is a project that will provide its token in the future

[romelitounknown]

What is actually ICO? Is this a project? Or it is a currency?

That is a frequently ask questions by all newbies, anyway ICO is not a cryptocurrency, It is "Initial Coin Offering" meaning you have to buy their native tokens as an investments on their ongoing project.By buying their tokens they are giving you some parts of company shares that will soon increases in value together with how many token you bought after their tokens has been listed on any exchanges.

[khalidxpert]

Well everyone defines ICO pretty good. I juat want to add ico is very risky as well. Please join the xompany/coin website and their social media accounts before buying coin/token and read their whitepaper and discuss with their admins devs to determine they are reall people or not. Many coins do scam after and even before they get list in any exchange.

[cizatext]

sold at a very low price before coming to the main exchange. Those who buy coins at that time, they are benefitted later.

Most of the time, they are worth nothing and never appear on any exchange on any serious one.
So anything people buy, they throwing money out of window.

But not all initial coin offering is a total throwing of money through the window as you have, cause there are a couple of ICOs who turn out to be successful and those who invested in them during their token sales make huge profits from them. What any investor of an icos should look out for is the project utility capacity that is if it have a working product already.

[BayAreaCoins]

Mostly (if not all) scams.

[yuluxugi32132]

most of the ICOs are scams where the founders create coins out of thin air and sell all of the to customers.

[boyptc]

Before ICO is a way to collect fund to make a project better and do what it plans to operate.

But right now, it's all about giving their investors useless tokens in exchange of bitcoin / ethereum.

[musepreseason]

A basic google search might help you with that. Initial coin offerings as refereed and quite dangerous to invest in if you won't study the ICO first.

[SihaToken]

An initial coin offering (ICO) or initial currency offering is a type of funding using cryptocurrencies. Mostly the process is done by crowdfunding but private ICO's are becoming more common. (cite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_coin_offering)

[ice18]

I will define ICO according to my understanding ICO is a type of collecting funds or money from every investors around the world which is not restricted or illegal to join,ICO owners are group of people or an organization that are planning to create a blockchain project in return of a digital asset known as token and later can be traded on exchanges to have a value just like bitcoin.