The Rise and Potential Fall of Cryptocurrency ICOs

With so many cryptocurrency ICOs taking place right now, something will need to change. It appears the entire cryptocurrency ICO scene is turning into a bit of a joke. Useless tokens are created which offer no real value to users, yet people are still throwing money at them. It is very unsettling.

Cryptocurrency ICOs – Bubble or not?

There are positive and negative sides to the entire cryptocurrency ICO sector. The positive element comes in the form of giving people a way to raise enough funds to create new products and services. Although not all of these concepts will succeed, using an ICO is the quickest and less cumbersome way of raising the necessary money right now. It creates a slew of new opportunities, which may also be its downfall.

To put this latter part into perspective, one could make the argument a lot of “dumb money” is poured into cryptocurrency ICOs. Most of these “investors” do not even take the time to read a project’s website or white paper. All they want is instant gratification and see the value of their tokens go up by 1,000% in a week or less. Sustaining such a bubble will not be possible for much longer.

As a result, we now see a lot of prominent ICO tokens decline in value as soon as they hit an exchange. Not because people are selling at a profit, but mainly because these “investors” have no patience. In fact, it has become almost cheaper to buy ICO tokens after a Bittrex listing compared to partaking in the ICO itself. Even with lucrative bonuses for early investors, there is no real reason to buy into ICOs right away. Once again, another sign of the cryptocurrency ICO “bubble” about to pop.

To make matters even worse, we now see people spending money on “joke” ICOs which offer no inherent value. Some people still believe even vaporware can be turned into something valuable, though this is rarely the case. In fact, anyone can create their own ERC20 tokens in an hour or less and post the smart contract address to the whole world. Regardless of what the tokens may be used for, there will always be people actively investing in these ICOs.

Not too long ago, we touched upon the concept of the Useless Ethereum Token. It was believed this ‘joke” ICO would not receive any money whatsoever. Things have turned out quite differently. The project’s smart contract address has seen nearly 20,000 transactions since it was revealed to the public. People are actively sending money to it, although no one knows why exactly. Most of these transactions are for 0.01 ETH. However, thousands of those small transactions still add up over time.

The cryptocurrency ICO ecosystem is showing a lot of signs of becoming a bubble. Billions of dollars have been invested in projects with no actual demo or prototype. The code for these projects has never been vetted by third parties in many cases. Lots of people will lose money due to investing in ICOs. Doing your own research when it comes to cryptocurrency ICOs has never been more important than it is today.