ICO (Initial Coin Offering)
Crowdfunding by token sale — the 2017 boom that raised billions, minted a few giants, and taught regulators everything.
An ICO sells a project’s new tokens to the public to raise capital, typically before any product exists. The 2017–18 mania raised over $20 billion; a handful of funded projects became infrastructure (Ethereum’s own 2014 sale is the great success story), while the majority delivered losses, abandonment or fraud.
Regulators responded by treating most such sales as unregistered securities offerings, pushing the industry toward exchange-hosted sales, airdrops and venture rounds instead. The durable lesson for evaluating any token sale since: a whitepaper is not a product, and “utility” promised later is priced like equity but protected like nothing.