Initial coin offerings, or ICOs, have raised over $3.2 billion so far in 2017, up from almost nothing in 2016. They’re getting so common that ICOs have passed venture capital for early-stage funding in blockchain startups.
So I’m generally not too interested when getting a pitch about yet another cryptocurrency “token generation event.”
But most ICOs don’t have Dan Ariely, he of Predictably Irrational and a host of other behavioral marketing business books, as an investor. And most aren’t already in use in multiple communities, powering 50,000 actual transactions of actual goods and services in an average month.