The Rise and Fall of ICOs: Lessons Learned

[Ravichnadra]

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!

[moneystery]

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.

[Bureau]

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.

[Mpamaegbu]

Share your war stories, victories, and facepalms. What lessons did you learn from the ICO rollercoaster?

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.

[Coyster]

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.

[Ever-young]

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.

[Adbitco]

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.

[Text]

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!

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.

[tsaroz]

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!

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.

[Sunderland]

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!

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.

[avikz]

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 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.

[MAAManda]

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!

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).

[tvplus006]

...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!

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

[passwordnow]

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?

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.

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 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.

[sheenshane]

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.

[btc78]

Remember those ICO mania days when every token seemed like a golden ticket? Fast forward to Reality Check City.

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

[Strongkored]

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.

[Bitstar_coin]

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.

[Odusko]

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.

[Hypnosis00]

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.