In the deep night of a certain day in 2017, two university students deployed a few lines of code to the Ethereum network using a laptop in a café in Silicon Valley.
The next morning, their cryptocurrency project published a white paper on its official website, and within just 72 hours, investors from around the world had sent $30 million worth of Ether to a strange address. This virtual cat-raising game, named "Blockchain Cats," opened a fantastical chapter in human financial history—the ICO gold rush.

Revolution of the Financing Paradigm

While traditional startups queued for months in front of Sequoia Capital for a chance to pitch, ICO (Initial Coin Offering) created a disruptive financing model: developers did not need to give up equity, investors did not have to sign legal documents, project white papers replaced business plans, and cryptocurrency wallets took the place of bank accounts. With the standardized support of the Ethereum ERC-20 protocol, anyone could easily issue tokens as if creating a social media account.

This de-thresholded financing quickly ignited the market. In 2016, global ICO financing amounted to only $256 million, but it skyrocketed to $6.5 billion in 2017, and in the first four months of 2018, it surpassed $6.3 billion. The Swiss town of Zug gathered hundreds of ICO teams, with hotel conference rooms hosting "five-minute pitches to persuade investors" day and night. Even Nobel laureate Robert Shiller marveled: "This is the ultimate test of human collective belief."

Symbiosis of Idealism and Speculative Bubble

During the craziest times of ICOs, two types of projects competed for the flood of funds: one type, like Filecoin, attempted to reconstruct the cloud storage market with token economics; the other type, like the Useless Ethereum Token (literally "Useless Ether"), had founders who admitted, "The token has no function, purely satisfying speculative demand," yet still raised $300,000.

This absurdity concealed a profound belief in technology. Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood once described: "We are building financial Legos, each token is a combinable element." The star project of 2017, Bancor, attempted to achieve automated market-making through smart contracts, raising $153 million in just 3 hours during its ICO. When the project token BNT surged 800% on its first day of trading, on-chain data showed that over 40% of buyers came from developing countries without bank accounts—where technological idealism and the grassroots dream of wealth collided fiercely.

Undercurrents of Ecological Game Theory

ICOs spawned a complete industrial chain.

In Mumbai and Manila, technical writers produced manifestos proclaiming "disrupting Amazon" and "surpassing Google" at a price of $500 per page. Small exchanges openly priced their services, charging 10 BTC to ensure a token's first-day listing.

Market cap management teams created trading volume through on-chain address wash trading, drawing perfect curves on candlestick charts.

This gray ecology peaked in January 2018. A certain Korean project recorded a transaction at $32,000 at the moment of opening on the exchange—an increase of 65,000 times from the issue price. When retail investors rushed in, the big players had already completed their harvest through pre-placed sell orders.

Regulatory Iron Curtain and Industry Reconstruction

In September 2017, the People's Bank of China and six other ministries jointly declared ICOs as "illegal public financing," causing global ICO financing to plummet by 90% within three months. The U.S. SEC subsequently sued Telegram (for a $1.7 billion ICO) and Kik (for a $100 million ICO), accusing them of violating securities laws. In the Southern District Court of New York, the judge determined the nature of tokens with three questions: "Do investors expect profits? Are profits derived from the efforts of others? Is there a common enterprise?" These three questions became the sword of Damocles hanging over all ICO projects.

Under regulatory pressure, the industry began self-purification. Compliant ICOs (SAFT agreements) required fundraising only from accredited investors; exchanges mandated projects to disclose team backgrounds and fund usage; auditing firms began tracking the code risks of smart contracts. Developers of Ethereum, who once created the "five-minute token issuance myth," started submitting legal document templates on GitHub, annotating: "Line 23 of the code may trigger regulation under Chapter 5 of the Securities Act."

The Paradigm Legacy Reborn from the Ruins

Although 90% of ICO projects fell silent, the legacy of this experiment continues to reshape the financial system.

The DAO incident, while leading to a hard fork of Ethereum, validated the possibility of code governance.

STO (Security Token Offering) maps traditional assets onto the blockchain, with the Tzero platform completing the first real estate tokenization transaction.

Filecoin cultivated a developer ecosystem through token airdrops, establishing a decentralized storage network.

In an office building in Singapore, the founder of the 2017 ICO star project ICONIX is planning a new project. This time, they no longer promise to "change the world," but instead design tokens as game items, requiring users to complete programming courses to unlock benefits. "We finally understand," he points to a team photo from the ICO frenzy on the wall, "blockchain doesn't need to save the world; it just needs to create real value."

When the Tide Goes Out

Looking back from 2023, the ICO craze resembles a digital mirror of the 17th-century Dutch tulip bubble. But unlike that bubble, which left a mess behind, this one left behind the on-chain identities of hundreds of millions of people, infrastructure worth trillions of dollars, and a collective memory of decentralized financing. As Visa begins to settle cross-border payments with stablecoins, as Sequoia Capital launches cryptocurrency funds, and as El Salvador designates Bitcoin as legal tender—these realities prove that the crazy experiment from six years ago has already etched irreversible patterns into the layers of the financial system.

Just as the internet bubble gave birth to Amazon and Google, after the ICO frenzy receded, over 440,000 ERC-20 tokens remain active on Ethereum; they may eventually become the infrastructure tools of the new economic era, like pickaxes and jeans during the gold rush. And that Norwegian programmer who exchanged 1 Bitcoin for 50,000 "Blockchain Cat" tokens in 2017 is now operating the largest DeFi protocol in Northern Europe on the outskirts of Oslo—his office wall features an abstract painting: countless code fragments reassembling in the void, ultimately piecing together the next chapter of human financial history.

AiCoin official website: www.aicoin.com

Telegram: t.me/aicoincn

Twitter: x.com/AiCoinzh

Email: support@aicoin.com

Group chat: Customer Service Yingying, Customer Service KK

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。