Initial Coin Offerings as a Fundraising Strategy

For those who haven't been keeping a close eye on the evolution of blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the ever-expanding collection of altcoins built atop or otherwise reliant upon the few core blockchains, the recent spate of large Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) might seem as though they arrived from out of the blue. Startup companies have been raising tens of millions of dollars on the basis of the most flimsy and unrealistic of business proposals, simply by launching and then selling a new set of limited issue tokens based on the Ethereum system. The promise of these tokens being used in some future API or system of exchange is barely even visualized in many cases, let alone planned or under construction. Yet the tokens are eagerly purchased in exchange for bitcoins or ether cryptocurrency, and then go on to trade for multiples of that price. Those of us in fields like longevity science that struggle for funding might well look at this and ask how we can participate in this apparently magical money fountain. So what is going on here? The answer to that comes in two parts. Firstly, the technical underpinnings. Blockchains considered in the abstract are a use of cryptography to solve an important problem in distributed collaboration. Within their bounds, they can be used to enable verification of identity, trust between anonymous parties, business ledgers that do not rely upon any one central party, escrow that doesn't require a trusted escrow holder...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs