
Ask HN: Any ICO that actually delivers what it promises? - archibaldJ
It&#x27;s the end of 2018 and I have not really come across any ICO that is not fraud (or hype and dump manipulation at best) in nature.<p>Doing start-up is already very hard itself. Trying to do a start-up and create a new economy surrounding a new currency often feels like downright fantasy-landish. I would say there is no point in creating a new currency when you are not introducing a new economy of some sort. It&#x27;s just not pragmatic. And ICOs as a sale for collectibles will only result in constant deprecation afterwards, unless the start-up actually delivers what it promises (and restores investor confidence whenever there is a downfall).<p>So is there any ICO that actually deliver what it promises? (other than Ethereum which has successfully created an economy of ICOs)
======
DennisP
Maker set out to create a stable-valued coin by trading volatility to
speculators who want to leverage ETH. That went live at the end of 2017 and
their DAI token has stayed stable within a couple percentage points despite
huge fluctuations in ETH value. It's been a popular system and the contract
holds a huge amount of backing ETH. (Token: MKR)

[https://makerdao.com/](https://makerdao.com/)

There are also a fair number of token exchanges built on Ethereum. Some use
the 0x protocol, which has off-chain orderbooks and executes trades on chain.
(Token: ZRX)

[https://0xproject.com/](https://0xproject.com/)

A completely different one is the Bancor network, which does away with order
book entirely, relying instead on reserves held in contracts. (Token: BNT)

[https://about.bancor.network/](https://about.bancor.network/)

These are all live on Ethereum today.

~~~
camjohnson26
Other than Bancor I'm not sure these count as ICOs. There's a lot of
successful smart contracts.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/comments/5oyr28/maker_ico_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/comments/5oyr28/maker_ico_and_polychain/)

~~~
DennisP
Thanks, I didn't realize that about Maker. But here's an old page I pulled up
on the ZRX ICO: [https://icobench.com/ico/0x](https://icobench.com/ico/0x)

------
the_clarence
Prediction: this thread is going to be a honeypot for ICO advertisers and bad
opinions.

No ICO has had a real utility in my opinion. Some smart contracts and some
cryptocurrencies do seem to be getting there, but not the ICOs I'm afraid.

~~~
DennisP
I guess "real utility" is subjective but based on the comments here, a fair
number of projects held an ICO and then delivered what they promised.

~~~
RIMR
A fair number of people have also left a casino with a great deal more than
they entered with. That doesn't mean casinos deliver on a promise of profit.

~~~
DennisP
The question was "is there any ICO that actually delivered what it promised?"
The answer is obviously yes.

If you were to ask "are startups who run ICOs more likely to succeed than
fail" then of course the answer is no. But that's a reality also faced by
angel investors and VCs.

You might also ask whether ICO token prices on average went up or down, but
that has nothing to do with OP's question at all.

------
cwmma
ponzicoin did exactly what it said on the tin

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180125000227/https://ponzicoin...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180125000227/https://ponzicoin.co/home.html)

~~~
vertoc
Glad I could deliver :P

~~~
quickthrower2
You worked too hard.

[https://uetoken.com](https://uetoken.com)

------
camjohnson26
Augur's decentralized prediction marketplace:
[https://www.augur.net/](https://www.augur.net/)

~~~
meowface
Augur is the only ICO I still hear a lot about in terms of having an actually
useful purpose (beyond the market surrounding the coin itself). So this should
be at least one correct answer to OP's question.

Disclaimer: Have never used it myself.

~~~
gibsons77
I've used it and it's fairly straight forward if you're tech savy. I bet on
the midterm election, and the price of ETH. Since it's just a set of smart
contracts, I expect market makers to start building 3rd party UI's to shill
their markets, which should be interesting.

------
sputknick
Augur is the best example. It's live, and works very similarly to how it was
conceived. It's slow and relatively expensive (1-2% per transaction), but that
was the plan all along, get something out there that can be improved and
iterated on. they have a roadmap in place to make it faster and cheaper. They
have pushed out like 8 or so updates since going live in July.

------
PabloOsinaga
MakerDAO seems to be delivering on the original vision quite well -
[https://makerdao.com/](https://makerdao.com/)

~~~
Legogris
They never had an ICO, though.

~~~
RexetBlell
They minted 1,000,000 MKR tokens a few years ago and were selling small
amounts every month to the public for the past few years. They have less than
500k tokens left right now. Why doesn't that count as an ICO? (btw, it's one
of the most promising blockchain projects out there with a real working
product that has real usage and usefulness)

------
archibaldJ
found a 2017 avc post on ICOs and VCs ([https://avc.com/2017/06/icos-and-
vcs/](https://avc.com/2017/06/icos-and-vcs/)) mentioning the brave browser.

[https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

can be an interesting case of study

------
sjroot
One that has always stood out to me as being a great idea with a (AFAIK)
functional product is Filecoin.

[https://filecoin.io](https://filecoin.io)

~~~
PlaneSploit
Filecoin is not a functional product :(

------
geraldbauer
FYI: A while ago I put together an Awesome Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) Truths
page - [https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-ico-
truths](https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-ico-truths) All about the
Art of the Steal. Cheers. Prost.

PS: A different take is the "Get Rich Quick "Business Blockchain" Bible - The
Secrets of Free Easy Money" (Yes, Free Online Booklet) -
[https://bitsblocks.github.io/get-rich-quick-
bible](https://bitsblocks.github.io/get-rich-quick-bible)

------
encyclopedia
1\. Quant Network (QNT)
[https://reddit.com/r/QuantNetwork/](https://reddit.com/r/QuantNetwork/)

2\. Vectorspace AI (VXV)
[https://reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9k5i8u/askscience_a...](https://reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9k5i8u/askscience_ama_series_were_team_vectorspace_ai/)

3\. Numerai (NMR)
[https://reddit.com/r/numerai/](https://reddit.com/r/numerai/)

~~~
elephant_7
Not sure about QNT but NMR and VXV definitely

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Ocha
STORJ is releasing its v3 of the network next year. Their community managers
and company are hiding data and making their network less and less transparent
(stopped publishing public data regarding network usage, data breakout per
payout address, transparency and automation around usage logs and payouts),
but it is still a product and dev side is making huge progress on it.

[https://storj.io/](https://storj.io/)

~~~
tardigras
Storj internal person here: If you're referring to the change from publishing
a payout sheet to providing the new payout tool, we did this to better protect
the privacy of our farmers. Even though all the data you're talking about is
public (on the ethereum blockchain and the Storj network) we didn't want to
make it easy for those who might want to target farmers (those sharing their
hard drive space) on the network. Usage on the current network has dropped off
significantly due to us limiting new users while we build out network V3. If
you haven't checked out the alpha, you can run a local test network following
tutorials on our GitHub: github.com/storj/storj

------
loourr
While it's still early days, I think holochain is showing real promise and has
delivered alpha software that delivers on it's promises.

They're creating a framework for building decentralized applications built
ontop of distributed hash tables (the technology behind torrents) instead of
blockchain.

[https://holochain.org/](https://holochain.org/)

~~~
angryasian
besides possibly open source applications, I just can't think of any good use
case for this ? Why ?

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azeirah
[https://funfair.io/](https://funfair.io/) has a live blockchain-based casino.

~~~
DennisP
A pretty nifty one too: the games are fast because you don't have to wait on
blocks, but you don't have to trust the casino (either for custody or
randomness) because it's based on state channels.

~~~
azeirah
Yep, they got state channels (branded as fate channels, haha) working even
before Ethereum did!

~~~
DennisP
State channels will never be part of the core Ethereum protocol. The idea has
always been for projects like that to be built independently on top.

------
camjohnson26
Sia is an interesting decentralized storage network:
[https://sia.tech/](https://sia.tech/)

Although there's still some scaling issues to sort out:
[https://blog.spaceduck.io/sia-load-test-
preview/](https://blog.spaceduck.io/sia-load-test-preview/)

~~~
com4ter
We just got our host online yesterday, hosting 4TB of space,the discord
community is very helpful.

~~~
camjohnson26
How's it working for you? The main issues I've seen are it's hard to estimate
the costs and doesn't handle small files very well.

------
brathouz
Augur was one of the first ICOs. They promised a decentralized oracle and
prediction market protocol (with dispute resolution) and that's what they
delivered.

Their REP token sale was in 2015, they spent a few years developing their
smart contracts while providing weekly updates and contributing a lot back to
the Ethereum community, and finally launched in July 2018.

[https://www.augur.net/](https://www.augur.net/)

[https://augur.stackexchange.com/](https://augur.stackexchange.com/)

To see the prediction markets without setting up the Augur client, you can use
the following site:

[https://predictions.global/](https://predictions.global/)

------
tmlee
Decentralized exchange protocols like
[https://0xproject.com/](https://0xproject.com/) and
[https://kyber.network/](https://kyber.network/)

------
quickthrower2
Physical stablecoins, ICOs regularly and advertises in the press.

[https://www.royalmint.com](https://www.royalmint.com)

------
gammateam
Pareto Network (PARETO) is a working dapp with users and a token. People use
it to trade and value information, it is mostly financial and trade
information that people, people do get paid.

I thought it was compelling

[https://blog.pareto.network/why-do-we-need-a-blockchain-
for-...](https://blog.pareto.network/why-do-we-need-a-blockchain-for-
this-44f5cddf68e2)

There are others too

------
dguido
[https://livepeer.org/](https://livepeer.org/) has a functional product

------
dumbfounder
Bloom Token: [https://bloom.co/](https://bloom.co/)

------
ascendantlogic
[https://airswap.io](https://airswap.io)

------
tmlee
We just published a Q3 2018 report at
[http://bit.ly/coingeckoQ32018](http://bit.ly/coingeckoQ32018) with a
quarterly section on ICO

------
dguido
[https://polyswarm.io/](https://polyswarm.io/) has a functional product

------
patrickk
EthLend allows decentralised loans, they have a working product and an active
team with regular updates:

[https://ethlend.io](https://ethlend.io)

Oveview of the loan process:
[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ETHLend/Documentation/mast...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ETHLend/Documentation/master/images/ETHLend_WP_Page-14.png)

------
ceejayoz
Does [https://uetoken.com/](https://uetoken.com/) count?

------
chrisco255
Qtum: [https://qtum.org/en](https://qtum.org/en)

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com4ter
Brave has had a good amount of success, I use it as my main mobile browser.

------
standerman
With Ethereum, is creating an economy of scams really something positive?

------
0xfeba
BAT? Basic Attention Token? Did they have an ICO?

~~~
com4ter
Yes, this is the only one I can vouche for. The mobile browser is great

------
alexnewman
hcaptcha.com is already live with customers however

\- No ICO yet \- Still doing payments on testnet

------
cortesoft
No

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alistproducer2
PundiX

------
lucd
Simple Token is introducing a new economy of some sort.

Companies will use the OST token to tokenize their economy. To mint their own
branded token (BT) they'll have to stake a corresponding amount of OST
token.(according to the ratio they chosed when creating the BT) So market cap
of OST tokens = combined market cap of each BT economy + value of unstacked
OST tokens.

They're definitively delivering. Some partners started to mint tokens on
mainnet (alpha).

[https://ost.com/](https://ost.com/)

[https://ost.com/partners](https://ost.com/partners)

Draft of OpenST Mosaic paper, “Running Meta-Blockchains to Scale Decentralized
Applications"

[https://medium.com/ostdotcom/openst-mosaic-paper-released-
fo...](https://medium.com/ostdotcom/openst-mosaic-paper-released-for-
community-review-b7e39c5f4a4a)

~~~
archibaldJ
After checking out the website I would say I'm very skeptical about the actual
value it delivers.

This is basically a wrapper around Etheruem with more buzz words. Nothing
interesting going on.

~~~
lucd
From what you say I think you looked your should have a better look. Anyone
can create a token on Ethereum but how can you confer value to it? Make an ICO
and list on exchanges? You may use OST instead..

[https://medium.com/ostdotcom/why-lgbt-foundation-chose-
not-t...](https://medium.com/ostdotcom/why-lgbt-foundation-chose-not-to-do-an-
ico-and-launch-a-token-on-ost-instead-4eb2fa163c70)

Mosaic is all about making Ethereum more scalable, whith cheaper fees..

[https://medium.com/ostdotcom/worldwide-introduction-of-
opens...](https://medium.com/ostdotcom/worldwide-introduction-of-openst-
mosaic-protocol-scaling-blockchain-economies-to-billions-of-users-
adbd18d75cf4)

~~~
archibaldJ
So you are "conferring" value to it with more buzzwords and façades and PRs?
nice try.

I would like to see how long everyone in the team can keep a straight face to
it before people start leaving. Well you will eventually leave after spilling
out all your tokens too anyway.

Can be interesting to see who are the last remaining ones inside the start-up.
(HR or sales or marketing?)

~~~
lucd
I tried to explain this in my first post.. I must have been unclear as it
seems you didn't grab the concept.. Maybe you should forget everything I said
and focus more on official resources.. and less on being that diminutive of a
legit project.. A well-staffed one too
[https://ost.com/team](https://ost.com/team)

"The OpenST protocol enables the creation of utility tokens on a utility
blockchain while the value of those tokens is backed by staked crypto-assets
on a value blockchain."

[https://help.ost.com/support/solutions/articles/35000054307-...](https://help.ost.com/support/solutions/articles/35000054307-how-
is-ost-unique-and-distinctive-are-there-others-in-the-space-doing-this-)

"What is Simple Token (OST)? An Overview With CEO Jason Goldberg"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yreYVlV-f2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yreYVlV-f2s)

