Just came back from FinTech Week NY's Blockchain Day where I sat through several presentations from companies that are planning or in the process of an ICO. It was one of the most exciting, energized conferences I have been to, but also a lot of concern over the amount of BS detection that was required.
One of the quotes that stood out from the morning was the forecast that we would be seeing over 200 ICO's per week in the Fall. Already we are seeing up to 5 per day. If even a fraction of these are successful, our future world will require individuals to hold dozens, if not hundreds of different currencies in order to go about their daily business. The process of acquiring the appropriate tokens to participate in a micro-economy is going to serve as a barrier to entry and will discourage broader participation. And... the potential for swings in value will cause pricing challenges within each micro-economy.
Imagine I want to purchase a product... a pair of sneakers for example, and in order to purchase them from the shoe.io token economy, I need to transfer my dollars into shoecoins before making the purchase. Not only does that cause friction to the purchase process, but the price I pay for those shoes is going to be heavily dependent on the exchange rate and I may want to wait until the shoecoins are at the best value before buying in.
While shoecoins may not exist in the near future, (though I would not be at all shocked to see the ICO announced next week,) real users of these micro-economies will be forced to confront this process on a daily basis. While it isn't a challenge to speculators whose whole focus is on the exchange, it is a problem for real users of the networks. If I want to use the money earned from selling out my disk storage (Storj) and processor power (Golem) to purchase a room to stay in Paris for the weekend (Atlant), then I need to make three exchanges which will all be fluctuating on these markets and introduce considerations that are not in the average person's interest.
This problem needs to be solved if ICO's are to really be successful as future networks of real value exchange.