“The most common exit strategy was that we lost all our money.”

— Jack Melchor, venture capitalist

If you enjoyed this article, do consider following me on Twitter.

Bitcoin spent the year running up from $10 to a $1000, a tidy 100x profit for anyone maniacal enough to believe in digital gold before it was digital gold.

Near the peak of bitcoin mania in 2013, your cousin Greg in finance texts you about Mastercoin.

What’s that, you ask? A protocol layer on top of Bitcoin so anyone can issue their own currencies – GoldCoin, USDCoin, EuroCoin – without changing bitcoin itself. This was “asset issuance” before Pump and Zora was churning out 20,000 tokens a day. In Mastercoin founder J.R. Willett’s words, Bitcoin stores value-transfers, Mastercoin assigns extra meaning.

Neat! A protocol building on top of what will be the greatest internet money that ever existed.

Want in? Simple – send BTC to the infamous public “Exodus” address before a deadline to get credited MSC tokens at a fixed ratio. No KYC, no curated whitelists, no hard caps, completely permissionless. By the way, also no annoying tokenomics pie charts with bare-bones disclosures on vesting standards.

Nothing could’ve been simpler.

Mastercoin eventually raises $500K in BTC in July 2013. But was this a one-off thing?

The “Massive Array of Internet Disks, Secure Access For Everyone” – or MaidSafe – proved it wasn’t. MaidSafe (now Safecoin) rode the earliest waves of ICO hype, raising ~$6–7M in hours. CoinDesk reports:

During the initial sale, safecoins will be made available via purchase of a ‘proxy token’ called MaidSafeCoin. These are recorded on the bitcoin block chain and available from buysafecoins.com at a price of 17,000 for 1 BTC, or 3,400 for 1 MSC (Mastercoin).

Screw IPOs, ICOs are in.

Undeterred by Mt Gox’s collapse, Vitalik Buterin and his seven co-founders launched the Ethereum ICO six months later, raising $18.3 million across 42 days.

Like Mastercoin and Maidsafe, a presale website generated you a BTC payment address that forwarded to the genesis sale wallet address. Unlike its predecessors however, the ETH presale was sold at a “fixed” price: 2,000 ETH/BTC for the first 14 days, then linearly decaying to 1,337 ETH/BTC and stayed flat for the last 6 days. ETH was created after the sale; there wasn’t a fixed cap buyers competed for.

I put “fixed” in quotes because ICO investors were depositing monies in BTC, a 95% volatility asset (Thank God for stablecoins today).

Swarm, the proclaimed "Facebook of Crowdfunding" goes on to raise 1200 bitcoin (~$1 million) in a record 18 hours. Augur raises $5 million for the first ever prediction market, Lisk raises 14,000 bitcoin (~$6 million), Waves raises $16 million. You probably don’t know what any of these are. Early ICO investors themselves are probably still wondering the same. Needless to say, it was emblematic of early ICO frenzy to “ape first, DYOR later”.

Meanwhile, the earliest crypto venture capital funds like Blockchain Capital and Pantera’s Bitcoin Fund emerges in 2013.

Why raise with a VC asking annoying due diligence questions when you have eager retail screaming at you to take their money? I suppose the train of thought must have been something like:

“Tokens are for open protocols; equity VC with SAFEs is for companies. If you’d like to build in peace, then maybe raise from a deep-pocketed, aligned fund that doesn’t mark you to market 24/7 and understands multi-year horizons, and you’d really like not to spray your cap table across 10,000 anon degenerates unless you really have to,” a wise venture capitalist said.

Mastercoin is now called Omni and MSC is OMNI.

The Ethereum-aligned community venture fund “The DAO” raises a whopping $150 million in a May crowdsale. Contributors sent lots of ETH to a contract, which got exploited a month later and resulted in the first Ethereum hard-fork.

ICO mania met its first resistance here. Vitalik himself cautioned that people are taking ICOs “too far” and that “we are in a bubble because all the cryptocurrencies are rising and people have a feeling that they will always continue to rise.” Thankfully, Vitalik’s wisdom helps to temper the parabolic animal spirits of the market.

ICO investors were maybe , for once, considering how utterly insane it must be to be sending money over the internet to strangers on the promise of a website and whitepaper. Maybe not. As Chris Burniske & Jack Tatar chronicles in Cryptoassets:

For a few months after the DAOsaster there was a significant drop-off in ICOs, but by the end of 2016, cumulative ICO funding was $236 million for the year, which was nearly 50% of the $496 million raised through traditional venture capital for blockchain projects in 2016. Given the rate of growth in ICOs, 2017 may be the year where more money is raised through ICOs than through traditional venture capital.

In the aftermath of The DAO’s crowdsale came a wave of ever-larger ICOs: Bancor’s $153M in June 2017, Tezos’ $232M in July, the Hyundai Digital Asset Currency’s (Hdac) $258M raise later that year, and of course EOS’ year-long $4.1B monster raise.

It was around this time where KYC was slowly being brought back into the fold. Among the 2017 ICO cohort was Filecoin’s $257M raise, which ran through CoinList, an intermediary fundraising platform for SAFT-style token sales to mostly accredited investors. Kyber Network was another one of the first big public ICOs (~$60M) to require mandatory KYC + email whitelists, with per-person caps to reduce gas wars. Tezos’ ICO itself had no KYC, but mandated KYC/AML retroactively for contributors to claim tokens — an early high-profile example of compliance pushed onto ICO investors.

The emergence of KYC as a baseline ICO practice coincided with regulators finally baring their teeth. SEC officials, who have been shifting uneasily in their ivory towers for a while now, warned in a July “DAO Report” that many token sales would fall under U.S. securities law unless they were registered or structured as exemptions.

It’s hard not to be somewhat sympathetic to the SEC’s position.

Some of the largest ICO raises in this period were straight-up clown shows. You had the Venezuelan government’s state-backed Petro ($735M), TaTaTu’s watch-to-earn media token ($575M), and Dragon, a Macau-linked casino junket coin ($320M). These were just a few of the absolutely deranged blockchain pitches that retail was happily shoveling money into at the peak of ICO mania.

An Ernst & Young study next year finds that 86% of 2017 ICOs were below the listing price, and 30% have “lost substantially all value”.

Please remember, this is the bygone era that Twitter influencers are now nostalgically whining about.

Regulators breathing down everyone’s neck and prices nuking 80% was pretty much the kill shot for ICO mania.

Out of that wreckage, crypto VCs found PMF. The “professional investor” class in crypto crystallized here: Polychain and BlockTower showed up in 2017, then 2018 gave you the household names we all know now: Dragonfly, Placeholder, Multicoin, 1confirmation, a16z crypto, Paradigm, and the rest of the Patagonia vest-wearing financebro brigade.

Bitcoin is trading 80% down from its 2017 peaks in perhaps crypto’s most depressing bear market, and ICOs are pretty much dead on arrival.

ICO investors still wanted to give magic internet money to strangers over the internet, but they decided that this permissionless thing wasn’t so fun anymore.

CEXs and DEXs begin their earliest experimentations with IEOs (Initial Exchange Offerings) and IDOs (Initial DEX Offerings). IEOs had an obvious appeal: teams could leverage trusted CEX branding and received day one listing guarantee, liquidity and community engagement at the cost of KYC (and probably a lot of tokens).

The shift away from the “anyone send to this address” ICOs and into more structured IEO/IDO launches was basically the point where people started getting tired of the ICO free-for-all. Markets were quietly admitting: “Yeah that wild west was fun while it lasted,” and grappling ontosomething that felt somewhat safer.

IDO/IEO returns were predictably mixed. This was in the depths of the bear market after all. Some early IEOs on Binance Launchpad like BitTorrent Token ($7.2M) and Celer ($4M) popped; many later ones did not. IDOs would eventually find greater success on platforms like Polkastart and DAO Maker in 2020-2021.

By this point, the professionalization of the crypto VC machine is complete. Most serious money is coming from VCs, strategic investors, token seed rounds, not random public token sales.

Permissionless raises weren’t exactly dead though. Permissionless launches still found a home on platforms like Copper Launch (later rebranded to Fjord Foundry). Building off Balancer DEX’s smart contracts, tokens launched on what was called a “Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool” (LBP), where prices start high and decay over time to aid fairer price discovery and less bot sniping than fixed-price sales.

Participation on Fjord auctions was generally open with no KYC or curated whitelists, offering a third path alongside ICOs and IEOs/IDOs.

Some of the largest 2021 fund raises on Fjord included GameFi projects like Merit Circle ($105M), GuildFi ($140M) and Crypto Unicorns ($7M) – significant within the LBP niche but nowhere near the dreamy heights of 2017 ICOs.

ICOs weren’t necessarily dead. Big L1s like Avalanche did a $42M sale on Tokensoft; NEAR, Flow and Solana raised varying amounts of $1-30M on CoinList. But these public sales were basically appetizers next to the main courses i.e. the larger private VC rounds happening behind the scenes.

Polkadot parachain “crowdloans” in late-2021 were arguably the largest “public” capital formation events of this period, raising <$1 billion combined equivalent in DOT pledges. Note that these weren’t necessarily straight token sales though. Investors locked DOT so teams like Acala and Moonbeam could rent a parachain slot. In exchange, they received a bunch of Acala or Moonbeam tokens and got their DOT back at the end of two years.

There was also of course NFTs if you’d like to bucket the sale of 10,000 JPEGS under “fundraising”, but I’m going to skip that bit of history here.

ICOs are back… sort of.

Cobie debuts the Echo platform in March 2024, mixing private community-led groups with invite-only KYC’d access for token sales.

Echo’s very first deal was tiny: Ethena raised a miniscule $300K, which got snagged up in three hours just a day before ENA’s token generation event. In September, the Initia L1 chain raised $2.5M in two hours. In December, MegaETH raised $10 million in under 90 seconds.

Then there is Legion, which launched in August as a MiCA-aligned and self-proclaimed “merit-based” ICO platform.

Both Legion and Echo were similar in their aim to “democratize” fundraising access, but preserve legal guardrails and curation in token sales.

VCs are sort of threatened? The Block’s excellent Yogita Khatri reports:

In January, Echo said some VCs had tried to stop founders from offering better terms to the Echo community, or to block community sales altogether unless done as late-stage, high-valuation launches. “For a certain type of ‘follower’ VCs, crowdfunding platforms like Echo are absolutely an existential risk,” said Alexander Pack, co-founder and managing partner at Hack VC.

VCs are now forced to defend their business model. At ETHDenver 2025, Dragonfly Capital’s Haseeb Qureshi takes the stage against Legion’s Matt O’Connor.

Some choice quotes:

Matt O’Connor (Legion): “The idea that VCs are catalyzing growth and the product’s purpose to begin with…this gatekeeping and holier-than-thou attitude of VCs knowing which projects to fund leads to less experimentation and variety of what’s backed.”

Haseeb Qureshi (Dragonfly): “It’s rich since Legion raised money from VCs…and how many individual users using Legion own equity in Legion? I’m going to assume the number is zero.”

Gary Gensler steps down, Trump is president again, and ICOs are… back?

In May, Echo went further down the permissionless spectrum with its Sonar release, letting teams host their own public token sales while handling KYC/geo-filtering.

The stablecoin chain Plasma raises $500M in the first Sonar sale – a whopping 10x above its $50M target. MegaETH also conducts a second public sale in October, raising $470M in a 72-hour auction.

But it was the Solana memecoin factory Pump.fun that really made it feel like ICOs were so properly back. Pump’s July ICO pulled in $500M in public token sales and another $100M in CEX allocations within 12 whole minutes (on top of $700M it had already raised in private rounds).

Trump-era financial regulators seem really chill and cool about the industry giving money to anons over the internet again, which is nice.

And CEXs want in. In mid-September, Kraken partners with Legion to launch its own ICO platform “Kraken Launch”. Its first major sale, Yield Basis by Curve founder Michael Egorov, raised $5M.

Then in October, Coinbase scoops up Echo in a $375M deal. Coinbase’s plan is to host at least one public sale a month – the first is Monad’s blockbuster sale starting in T-minus three days.

Giving magic internet money to strangers over the internet is totally cool again and Gary Gensler isn’t around to spoil the fun any longer.

But if we’re going to spin the ICO roulette wheel again, there are folks that would like to bolt some guardrails onto the table first.

Enter MetaDAO, a little-known ICO launchpad on Solana that wants to run ICOs like they’ve actually learned something from past cycles. Sure, give money to strangers over the internet if you like, MetaDAO says, but cuff their hands to futarchy decision markets. Teams who choose to ICO can’t just walk off the treasury, are restricted to fixed monthly budgets. In theory, that means no rugpulls and more “you get paid if you actually ship”.

As I write this, MetaDAO’s highest profile launch to-date is the crypto neobank Avici, whose token is up 913% on its ICO price.

This is the end of the article where I make some bold and completely unsubstantiated predictions about how the landscape of crypto fundraising will pan out, but I’m going to pass.

Crypto really did the full lap. It started with janky “send BTC to this sketchy address and pray” ICOs, then swung hard into VC dominance, SAFTs, and KYC’d launchpads. For a while, it looked like the casino had been fenced off for average retail.

And yet here we are again. Retail is back in the mix, public sales are back on the menu, only this time with slightly better guardrails.

Crypto didn’t escape ICOs; it round-tripped back to them with a decade’s worth of scars and lessons (not really) baked in. We will continue to send magic internet money to strangers on the internet, we will get rugged, we will complain that VCs are dumping on us, and we will hopefully remember the friends we made along the way.

See you next week on Muff Taicho.

“The most common exit strategy was that we lost all our money.”

— Jack Melchor, venture capitalist

If you enjoyed this article, do consider following me on Twitter.

Bitcoin spent the year running up from $10 to a $1000, a tidy 100x profit for anyone maniacal enough to believe in digital gold before it was digital gold.

Near the peak of bitcoin mania in 2013, your cousin Greg in finance texts you about Mastercoin.

What’s that, you ask? A protocol layer on top of Bitcoin so anyone can issue their own currencies – GoldCoin, USDCoin, EuroCoin – without changing bitcoin itself. This was “asset issuance” before Pump and Zora was churning out 20,000 tokens a day. In Mastercoin founder J.R. Willett’s words, Bitcoin stores value-transfers, Mastercoin assigns extra meaning.

Neat! A protocol building on top of what will be the greatest internet money that ever existed.

Want in? Simple – send BTC to the infamous public “Exodus” address before a deadline to get credited MSC tokens at a fixed ratio. No KYC, no curated whitelists, no hard caps, completely permissionless. By the way, also no annoying tokenomics pie charts with bare-bones disclosures on vesting standards.

Nothing could’ve been simpler.

Mastercoin eventually raises $500K in BTC in July 2013. But was this a one-off thing?

The “Massive Array of Internet Disks, Secure Access For Everyone” – or MaidSafe – proved it wasn’t. MaidSafe (now Safecoin) rode the earliest waves of ICO hype, raising ~$6–7M in hours. CoinDesk reports:

During the initial sale, safecoins will be made available via purchase of a ‘proxy token’ called MaidSafeCoin. These are recorded on the bitcoin block chain and available from buysafecoins.com at a price of 17,000 for 1 BTC, or 3,400 for 1 MSC (Mastercoin).

Screw IPOs, ICOs are in.

Undeterred by Mt Gox’s collapse, Vitalik Buterin and his seven co-founders launched the Ethereum ICO six months later, raising $18.3 million across 42 days.

Like Mastercoin and Maidsafe, a presale website generated you a BTC payment address that forwarded to the genesis sale wallet address. Unlike its predecessors however, the ETH presale was sold at a “fixed” price: 2,000 ETH/BTC for the first 14 days, then linearly decaying to 1,337 ETH/BTC and stayed flat for the last 6 days. ETH was created after the sale; there wasn’t a fixed cap buyers competed for.

I put “fixed” in quotes because ICO investors were depositing monies in BTC, a 95% volatility asset (Thank God for stablecoins today).

Swarm, the proclaimed "Facebook of Crowdfunding" goes on to raise 1200 bitcoin (~$1 million) in a record 18 hours. Augur raises $5 million for the first ever prediction market, Lisk raises 14,000 bitcoin (~$6 million), Waves raises $16 million. You probably don’t know what any of these are. Early ICO investors themselves are probably still wondering the same. Needless to say, it was emblematic of early ICO frenzy to “ape first, DYOR later”.

Meanwhile, the earliest crypto venture capital funds like Blockchain Capital and Pantera’s Bitcoin Fund emerges in 2013.

Why raise with a VC asking annoying due diligence questions when you have eager retail screaming at you to take their money? I suppose the train of thought must have been something like:

“Tokens are for open protocols; equity VC with SAFEs is for companies. If you’d like to build in peace, then maybe raise from a deep-pocketed, aligned fund that doesn’t mark you to market 24/7 and understands multi-year horizons, and you’d really like not to spray your cap table across 10,000 anon degenerates unless you really have to,” a wise venture capitalist said.

Mastercoin is now called Omni and MSC is OMNI.

The Ethereum-aligned community venture fund “The DAO” raises a whopping $150 million in a May crowdsale. Contributors sent lots of ETH to a contract, which got exploited a month later and resulted in the first Ethereum hard-fork.

ICO mania met its first resistance here. Vitalik himself cautioned that people are taking ICOs “too far” and that “we are in a bubble because all the cryptocurrencies are rising and people have a feeling that they will always continue to rise.” Thankfully, Vitalik’s wisdom helps to temper the parabolic animal spirits of the market.

ICO investors were maybe , for once, considering how utterly insane it must be to be sending money over the internet to strangers on the promise of a website and whitepaper. Maybe not. As Chris Burniske & Jack Tatar chronicles in Cryptoassets:

For a few months after the DAOsaster there was a significant drop-off in ICOs, but by the end of 2016, cumulative ICO funding was $236 million for the year, which was nearly 50% of the $496 million raised through traditional venture capital for blockchain projects in 2016. Given the rate of growth in ICOs, 2017 may be the year where more money is raised through ICOs than through traditional venture capital.

In the aftermath of The DAO’s crowdsale came a wave of ever-larger ICOs: Bancor’s $153M in June 2017, Tezos’ $232M in July, the Hyundai Digital Asset Currency’s (Hdac) $258M raise later that year, and of course EOS’ year-long $4.1B monster raise.

It was around this time where KYC was slowly being brought back into the fold. Among the 2017 ICO cohort was Filecoin’s $257M raise, which ran through CoinList, an intermediary fundraising platform for SAFT-style token sales to mostly accredited investors. Kyber Network was another one of the first big public ICOs (~$60M) to require mandatory KYC + email whitelists, with per-person caps to reduce gas wars. Tezos’ ICO itself had no KYC, but mandated KYC/AML retroactively for contributors to claim tokens — an early high-profile example of compliance pushed onto ICO investors.

The emergence of KYC as a baseline ICO practice coincided with regulators finally baring their teeth. SEC officials, who have been shifting uneasily in their ivory towers for a while now, warned in a July “DAO Report” that many token sales would fall under U.S. securities law unless they were registered or structured as exemptions.

It’s hard not to be somewhat sympathetic to the SEC’s position.

Some of the largest ICO raises in this period were straight-up clown shows. You had the Venezuelan government’s state-backed Petro ($735M), TaTaTu’s watch-to-earn media token ($575M), and Dragon, a Macau-linked casino junket coin ($320M). These were just a few of the absolutely deranged blockchain pitches that retail was happily shoveling money into at the peak of ICO mania.

An Ernst & Young study next year finds that 86% of 2017 ICOs were below the listing price, and 30% have “lost substantially all value”.

Please remember, this is the bygone era that Twitter influencers are now nostalgically whining about.

Regulators breathing down everyone’s neck and prices nuking 80% was pretty much the kill shot for ICO mania.

Out of that wreckage, crypto VCs found PMF. The “professional investor” class in crypto crystallized here: Polychain and BlockTower showed up in 2017, then 2018 gave you the household names we all know now: Dragonfly, Placeholder, Multicoin, 1confirmation, a16z crypto, Paradigm, and the rest of the Patagonia vest-wearing financebro brigade.

Bitcoin is trading 80% down from its 2017 peaks in perhaps crypto’s most depressing bear market, and ICOs are pretty much dead on arrival.

ICO investors still wanted to give magic internet money to strangers over the internet, but they decided that this permissionless thing wasn’t so fun anymore.

CEXs and DEXs begin their earliest experimentations with IEOs (Initial Exchange Offerings) and IDOs (Initial DEX Offerings). IEOs had an obvious appeal: teams could leverage trusted CEX branding and received day one listing guarantee, liquidity and community engagement at the cost of KYC (and probably a lot of tokens).

The shift away from the “anyone send to this address” ICOs and into more structured IEO/IDO launches was basically the point where people started getting tired of the ICO free-for-all. Markets were quietly admitting: “Yeah that wild west was fun while it lasted,” and grappling ontosomething that felt somewhat safer.

IDO/IEO returns were predictably mixed. This was in the depths of the bear market after all. Some early IEOs on Binance Launchpad like BitTorrent Token ($7.2M) and Celer ($4M) popped; many later ones did not. IDOs would eventually find greater success on platforms like Polkastart and DAO Maker in 2020-2021.

By this point, the professionalization of the crypto VC machine is complete. Most serious money is coming from VCs, strategic investors, token seed rounds, not random public token sales.

Permissionless raises weren’t exactly dead though. Permissionless launches still found a home on platforms like Copper Launch (later rebranded to Fjord Foundry). Building off Balancer DEX’s smart contracts, tokens launched on what was called a “Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool” (LBP), where prices start high and decay over time to aid fairer price discovery and less bot sniping than fixed-price sales.

Participation on Fjord auctions was generally open with no KYC or curated whitelists, offering a third path alongside ICOs and IEOs/IDOs.

Some of the largest 2021 fund raises on Fjord included GameFi projects like Merit Circle ($105M), GuildFi ($140M) and Crypto Unicorns ($7M) – significant within the LBP niche but nowhere near the dreamy heights of 2017 ICOs.

ICOs weren’t necessarily dead. Big L1s like Avalanche did a $42M sale on Tokensoft; NEAR, Flow and Solana raised varying amounts of $1-30M on CoinList. But these public sales were basically appetizers next to the main courses i.e. the larger private VC rounds happening behind the scenes.

Polkadot parachain “crowdloans” in late-2021 were arguably the largest “public” capital formation events of this period, raising <$1 billion combined equivalent in DOT pledges. Note that these weren’t necessarily straight token sales though. Investors locked DOT so teams like Acala and Moonbeam could rent a parachain slot. In exchange, they received a bunch of Acala or Moonbeam tokens and got their DOT back at the end of two years.

There was also of course NFTs if you’d like to bucket the sale of 10,000 JPEGS under “fundraising”, but I’m going to skip that bit of history here.

ICOs are back… sort of.

Cobie debuts the Echo platform in March 2024, mixing private community-led groups with invite-only KYC’d access for token sales.

Echo’s very first deal was tiny: Ethena raised a miniscule $300K, which got snagged up in three hours just a day before ENA’s token generation event. In September, the Initia L1 chain raised $2.5M in two hours. In December, MegaETH raised $10 million in under 90 seconds.

Then there is Legion, which launched in August as a MiCA-aligned and self-proclaimed “merit-based” ICO platform.

Both Legion and Echo were similar in their aim to “democratize” fundraising access, but preserve legal guardrails and curation in token sales.

VCs are sort of threatened? The Block’s excellent Yogita Khatri reports:

In January, Echo said some VCs had tried to stop founders from offering better terms to the Echo community, or to block community sales altogether unless done as late-stage, high-valuation launches. “For a certain type of ‘follower’ VCs, crowdfunding platforms like Echo are absolutely an existential risk,” said Alexander Pack, co-founder and managing partner at Hack VC.

VCs are now forced to defend their business model. At ETHDenver 2025, Dragonfly Capital’s Haseeb Qureshi takes the stage against Legion’s Matt O’Connor.

Some choice quotes:

Matt O’Connor (Legion): “The idea that VCs are catalyzing growth and the product’s purpose to begin with…this gatekeeping and holier-than-thou attitude of VCs knowing which projects to fund leads to less experimentation and variety of what’s backed.”

Haseeb Qureshi (Dragonfly): “It’s rich since Legion raised money from VCs…and how many individual users using Legion own equity in Legion? I’m going to assume the number is zero.”

Gary Gensler steps down, Trump is president again, and ICOs are… back?

In May, Echo went further down the permissionless spectrum with its Sonar release, letting teams host their own public token sales while handling KYC/geo-filtering.

The stablecoin chain Plasma raises $500M in the first Sonar sale – a whopping 10x above its $50M target. MegaETH also conducts a second public sale in October, raising $470M in a 72-hour auction.

But it was the Solana memecoin factory Pump.fun that really made it feel like ICOs were so properly back. Pump’s July ICO pulled in $500M in public token sales and another $100M in CEX allocations within 12 whole minutes (on top of $700M it had already raised in private rounds).

Trump-era financial regulators seem really chill and cool about the industry giving money to anons over the internet again, which is nice.

And CEXs want in. In mid-September, Kraken partners with Legion to launch its own ICO platform “Kraken Launch”. Its first major sale, Yield Basis by Curve founder Michael Egorov, raised $5M.

Then in October, Coinbase scoops up Echo in a $375M deal. Coinbase’s plan is to host at least one public sale a month – the first is Monad’s blockbuster sale starting in T-minus three days.

Giving magic internet money to strangers over the internet is totally cool again and Gary Gensler isn’t around to spoil the fun any longer.

But if we’re going to spin the ICO roulette wheel again, there are folks that would like to bolt some guardrails onto the table first.

Enter MetaDAO, a little-known ICO launchpad on Solana that wants to run ICOs like they’ve actually learned something from past cycles. Sure, give money to strangers over the internet if you like, MetaDAO says, but cuff their hands to futarchy decision markets. Teams who choose to ICO can’t just walk off the treasury, are restricted to fixed monthly budgets. In theory, that means no rugpulls and more “you get paid if you actually ship”.

As I write this, MetaDAO’s highest profile launch to-date is the crypto neobank Avici, whose token is up 913% on its ICO price.

This is the end of the article where I make some bold and completely unsubstantiated predictions about how the landscape of crypto fundraising will pan out, but I’m going to pass.

Crypto really did the full lap. It started with janky “send BTC to this sketchy address and pray” ICOs, then swung hard into VC dominance, SAFTs, and KYC’d launchpads. For a while, it looked like the casino had been fenced off for average retail.

And yet here we are again. Retail is back in the mix, public sales are back on the menu, only this time with slightly better guardrails.

Crypto didn’t escape ICOs; it round-tripped back to them with a decade’s worth of scars and lessons (not really) baked in. We will continue to send magic internet money to strangers on the internet, we will get rugged, we will complain that VCs are dumping on us, and we will hopefully remember the friends we made along the way.

See you next week on Muff Taicho.