ICO stands for Intial coin offering.It is almost same as IPO(Intial Public offering) but ICO works in Crypto or Virtual currency market.When a cryptocurrency startup company wants to raise money through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), It plans to lauch an ICO which includes a whitepaper which states that what is the project and what it includes and many more like total soft cap,Hard cap,Total number of tokens,Total supply,management members,How much fund they want to raised, what type of money is accepted like BTC,Eth and distribution of tokens and how long the ICO campaign will run.If money raised by the company does not meet the minimum requirement then the money is returned to the investors and the ICO is unsuccessful. If company raised the required funds within given time frame then it is some good sign until ICO is not listed to exchange. Since last one year investors got good return from ICO but As soon as ICO’s is getting popular scams are increasing day by day.So take caution if you are planning to invest in ICO.Recently many companies like Facebook,Google,twitter stop promoting ICO just to stop scams done through ICO’s. The first ICO was Mastercoin(now called Omni) in July 2013 by J.R. Willett.After that Ethereum tokens comes in 2014 and raised about 3700 BTC in just 12 Hours.In 2017 ICO got more popularity and they raised record Funds. Guys if you are planning to invest in ICO then please do your own research before.