It's finally happened you might have mumbled under your breath, I did. Everyone knew this was coming to the Crypto Space it was just a matter of time. What impact will this have though, especially on Ethereum and markets because this is a healthy sector and a price driver?
It was a way for entrepreneurs or people to give birth to their creation. Regardless if you believe in ICO's or not, the first ICO was MasterCoin (now known as Omni) and they crowdfunded for 1 month and launched July 31, 2013. Omni is now worth as of this post $35.29 and was as high as $75.14 this June according to CoinMC so obviously some consumer confidence and most of all lets not forget how Ethereum got here in the first place... You guessed it, Crowdsale!
Everyone's loving Ethereum not only for its platform base thanks to the brilliant mind of Vitalik but also for the endless possibilities of applications and programs.
If your a believer in blockchain being the way forward for the future, decentralised and options for anonymity, it may prove to be harder and harder as the tech gets more and more complicated and governments get involved.
This also brings us to the DOA and the SEC and what you could see as "It only takes a few bad eggs to ruin the batch" and this is referring to the select few that took advantage of the DAO because they could, users exploited a vulnerability in the DAO code to enable them to siphon off one third of DAO's funds to a subsidiary account. Also recent hackings of certain wallets and exchanges and all the plastering of the Yobit exchange with Espers Coin scam.
Examples of the few is used by the SEC to justify their meddlings and somewhat a "foot in the door" to apply what ever sanction they wish on a "case-by-case" basis depending if your start-up and ICO "falls" into the securities basket. In some way this may only be in the US conducted by US citizens or alienate America and give an opportunity to tech leading countries to take it forward and benefit.
It's a very up in the air rule set they are giving out to encourage start-ups or discourage start-ups or to even go as far as to sway the market, into certain bears and bulls especially for Ethereum as a lot of ICO's are built on top of Eths platform and a boost to the Ethereum economy. Guess we will have to wait and see the ripple effect it has over the next couple of months and years.
As always though, do your research about the company, read the white paper, watch youtube videos, learn about blockchain, get heavily involved in the community by the ways of Steemit, Coin Market Cap, twitter, facebook, and of course stay up to date by reading the SEC Statement