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Ask HN: Any ICO that actually delivers what it promises?

69 points by archibaldJ ↗ HN
It'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.

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'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).

So is there any ICO that actually deliver what it promises? (other than Ethereum which has successfully created an economy of ICOs)

68 comments

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azeirah
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
Augur's decentralized prediction marketplace: 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.
[dead] gobit
NIMIQ had a very functional testnet _before_ they ICO’d and launched the full, working chain in April.

One of those projects that started out with more substance/engineering than marketing, but got less attention because of it during the hype last year.

https://nimiq.com/

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/partners

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

https://medium.com/ostdotcom/openst-mosaic-paper-released-fo...

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...

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

https://medium.com/ostdotcom/worldwide-introduction-of-opens...

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

"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-...

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yreYVlV-f2s

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/

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/

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/

These are all live on Ethereum today.

PabloOsinaga
MakerDAO seems to be delivering on the original vision quite well - 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)
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.

the_clarence
Don't just read the comments. Go and find out what the product is about. Hell, try to use it. You will see what I'm talking about. It's fluff.
xtracto
I think golem.network actually has some tangible product right now.
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.
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/

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
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