Initial coin offering

That's when it experienced its first wave of mainstream adoption, spiking the price before swiftly crashing as many holders cashed out on the new wave of suckers.

2017 is often referred to as the ICO boom.

This is Jacob Silverman.

He's a journalist and author of several books about crypto, tech, and politics.

This may be a slight paraphrase, but there's a line from Brock Pierce, which is that whenever I need money, I just make a new token.

And that is something I think a lot of crypto entrepreneurs have taken to heart.

I mean, this is, of course, a central feature of the ICO boom, which was that people were just generating tokens all the time.

But there is no inherent value to almost any crypto token.

When you say a future for this, what exactly do you mean?

Will we see the revival of ICOs? Is it going to go back to the same volume and momentum that we had in the initial phase?

I very much agree with your assessment.

But I also want to point out that there are some legitimate platforms that were built around that.

I knew information about how to scan into pictures, how to set up an eBay list and how to connect PayPal that the average public didn't know in a second time.

It was 2015 when I started a cryptocurrency and I also started a company called ICO Ranker.

A guy told me about it in London.

I built a site and ended up selling it for several millions of dollars.

Over eight figures total of what we got for that, me and my business partner.

That was because most people, it was a WordPress website.

I put it up, had some listings of ICOs, put a little bit of AI into it back then and ranked the ICOs or the cryptos that were coming out.

Second time I saw.

So I thought Bitcoin was a physical item for the longest time.

But it wasn't until Ethereum and ICO and having some friends who were early Bitcoiners then explained to me the promise of smart contracts on chain, that really clicked for me.

And it made sense from a business perspective, a value prop perspective of who would be using the network and how that could have actually scaled.

Because the earliest Bitcoin days were, it was a payments network, right? And that's really what the main push was.

I think if you're taking it from a position from an investment thesis or a participant who is active in curating either side of those different opportunities, Bringing institutional assets to DeFi, it's interesting because it reminds me of the SEO era of 2017.

Security token offerings.

Why was it a three-letter acronym that almost mimics ICOs, initial coin offerings? Security token offerings, initial coin offerings.

Everyone in that phase of... tokenization back then was looking at STOs like a new capital formation mechanism so they were thinking oh my god look at these ICOs they're raising hundreds of millions of dollars even billions of dollars all they did was write a white paper this guy just wrote like a 10-page document he made a goofy website and this guy just raised 150 million dollars oh my god Okay, so what we're going to do, we're going to do an STO.