ico

These are not some backwater trend-following beta projects. 
These are some of the biggest, most reputable, trend-setting projects in crypto. Founders with reputations at stake, building novel frontier technology. 
And they’re all doing, or have done, public token sales. 
ICOs are, in my opinion, the purest mechanism for token distribution the market can come up with. That’s why the crypto market discovered them early in its development – in 2017. Token sales just make sense. Investors purchase tokens at a price, take on their fair share of risk, and can enjoy the upside they earned.
Exchanging capital for ownership is a fundamentally sound, logically consistent mechanism for distributing ownership and raising capital. Airdrops, yield farming, and points programs are all problematic distortions and contortions of the market – game-able, exploitable, and unsustainable. 
My first job in crypto was at an ICO advisory company. I wrote blogs and was the community manager for a handful of ICOs. I watched first-hand as our executive leadership pulled the fire alarm at the company, after our lawyers said that the company is basically assisting these ‘startups’ in conducting unregistered securities offerings. I didn’t do any meaningful work for over a quarter of the year, and then the company laid 65% of its workforce off.
Which is not to say that the ICO mania ended because of securities regulation. It ended because a few good ICOs proved to the market that you could raise a bunch of money, and it attracted a bunch of bad ICOs to come exploit this fact.
Enter the Gensler era, and the market never returned to what is a fundamentally correct way of trading capital for risk, and instead did these weird contorted maneuvers to effectively distribute ownership to the interested public – often through the hands of economic middlemen like sophisticated yield farmers and industrial airdrop farmers. 
Finally, with the new administration, we can return back to what capital markets have known for years – public sales are the best mechanism for distributing assets. Even more fortunately, in 2025, we now have eight years of auction mechanism design to create accurate and fair price discovery in public token offerings. 
 Aztec* and Uniswap have really pioneered this here, with the Uniswap CCA mechanism, which is probably the strongest liquidity bootstrapping mechanism I have seen to date. A Uniswap CCA is an auction mechanism that creates and distributes a token, over a long period of time, that still encourages early bidding over late bidding, while still preventing sniping or timing games, or rewarding sophisticated actors – an onchain price discovery mechanism for an asset that has  not yet seen the light of the market. 
For more sophisticated actors, a Uniswap CCA lets you express control of your desired valuation, by letting you get in at the earliest possible opportunity and capping the max valuation of your desired bid. For those who just want to market buy, and receive the average valuation as all other participants (which was my choice for the Aztec ICO), that is the default normal path. In both cases, the Uniswap CCA spreads out your bid for the entirety of the remaining time of the auction, eliminating the option to buy more tokens before others.
The price of the token can, and will, tick upwards as the auction goes on, correlated to the amount of capital that has been bid.  Ultimately, at the last block of the auction, everyone will be buying the same amount of tokens for the same amount of capital. Those who arrived at the auction earlier got earlier access to a lower price, but this is happening at a slow enough rate, and at a low enough slope, that I don’t think anyone can complain. 
But whatever – you can learn more about a Uniswap CCA on your own time. The point is… ICOs are fucking back baby. 
It’s important to emphasize that these are some of the industry's best projects at the moment, launching tokens through other incredibly high-reputation platforms, like Uniswap and Coinbase. 
We still need to rid the world of investor accreditation laws, but at least capital formation is happening the way it should be – with direct, un-intermediated relationships between those putting capital at risk, and teams working hard to deliver value. 
I hope this trend continues, and look forward to co-investing with you all!
#ICO #Airdrop $UNI

If you are active in the crypto space, you may have felt a significant change: airdrops are gradually phasing out, and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are making a strong comeback. After a 'silent period' in 2025, ICOs are experiencing an explosive resurgence, and the market is shifting from a venture capital-dominated 'one-man show' model to a more equitable and decentralized fundraising approach.
Why are ICOs making a comeback?
In simple terms, the number of users participating in crypto has tripled, everyone has become more professional, and the capital pool has grown larger. More importantly, the traditional venture capital financing model has exhausted retail investors' patience: insiders have taken away the majority of the profits, making it difficult for retail investors to profit while being trapped by high valuations. Meanwhile, the 'free coin giveaway' approach of airdrops has triggered selling pressure, leading many retail investors to become fatigued and shift their funds and attention towards memecoins, which have lower entry barriers and a more active community atmosphere.

In 2025, a significant event is happening that deserves the attention of all cryptocurrency participants:
ICOs are making a strong comeback from silence and have the opportunity to replace airdrops as the source of the next wave of massive wealth opportunities.

This is not nostalgia, nor is it a historical replay.
This is a systemic turning point driven by multiple factors, including changes in funding structure, participant structure, on-chain behavior, and an imbalance in market incentive culture.

This time, the ways ordinary people participate, the potential returns, and the opportunity windows will be completely different from those in 2017.

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01 The retreat of airdrops and the return of ICOs: changes in funding structure are reshaping the market