The segment of the criptomonedas is in full boil in a 2017 in which it seems that bitcoin seems to lose ground against Ethereum. The new platform that gives name to the virtual currency ether receives more and more interest, but it does so by another phenomenon called ICO.
Initial Coin Offering (ICO) has become one of the most interesting ways to attract millionaire investment rounds for all types of projects. The last one, created by the mobile messaging application Status, has managed to raise 270 million dollars in less than three hours.
Ethereum promises, but no one knows how much
This messaging and web browsing application is in the alpha phase, somewhat surprising considering that the financing rounds of projects like this tend to rely on products or services that are more mature or offer more guarantees in markets as competitive as that of mobile messaging .
Those responsible for Status created this ICO with an ether-based assessment: 1 ETH would equal 10,000 SNT (Status Network Token), another virtual cryptonnet specifically created to, among other things, be able to buy stickers in the application or access a "community Filtering and content discovery ".
The truth is that ether (ETH) has become the fashionable digital currency, and in fact recently The New York Times claimed that bitcoin should "step aside" to make way for ETH. Although both have grown exceptionally since the beginning of the year, ether's valuation has grown by 4,500% since it began in 2017. Amazing.
A phenomenon with too many unknowns
That of associating a different criptomoneda for each ICO is one of the reasons why we are suddenly seeing how things get complicated. The same happened with the Basic Attention Token (BAT) of the Brave project, which managed to raise a $ 36 million investment round without having demonstrated yet too many things in a sector as mature as the Internet browsers.
The new Status ICO has also raised questions, and in the Reddit debate for example some believe that the $ 270 million raised is just a clear sign of the greed of those responsible for the project. "Nobody needs those 250,000 damn millions of dollars to develop a project like Status." In Status the idea is to offer a kind of WeChat for the Western market: a messaging service that actually allows to do many more things.
The idea of financing these projects in this way is interesting: access to these investment rounds is open to the general public (or that is the theory, in Brave there was controversy about it), and it is a way that people who believe in such projects can Bet on them and do it so that investment can have a real economic return. It is like speculative patronage, so to speak.
Speculation or real opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors
In fact, speculation is another of the words that seem inevitably associated with all this fever that has been generated around the ICOs and Ethereum (as before to bitcoin). For many, the Ethereum ecosystem and the Smart Contracts that it allows create create a revolution in which many (if not all) transactions could be completed without any intermediary.
Of course, it is still too early to know whether or not we are in the face of that cryptonegnome bubble some people are talking about. Speculation exists, but also the possibility of a real revolution of the pillars that govern the current (economic and non-economic) transactions.
There may be many great winners here, but beware, because there can also be many big losers, and the current situation makes it impossible to know what to expect. Here we would almost follow that of "Be afraid when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are afraid" said the billionaire Warren Buffet, who invest and speculate knows a little.