Initial Coin Offerings

The FT's Alphaville blog has started a new series, called ICOmedy looking at the insanity surrounding Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). The blockchain hype has created an even bigger opportunity to separate the fools from their money than the dot-com era did. To motivate you to follow the series, below the fold there are some extracts and related links.

So far the series includes:

• ICOs and the money markets:
  

  how can you determine fair relative value or what the no-arbitrage condition for a multitude of crypto currencies should be if they bear no income potential whatsoever? They have no time value of money in the ordinary sense.
  
  If and when they do bear interest it is derived not from lending to a productive industry but to short sellers — and this is done at heterogeneous rates across varying exchanges and at varying risk. There is no uniform base lending rate. Everything is arbitrary. Worse than that, the lack of income equates the whole thing to a casino-style game of chance, with ongoing profits entirely dependent on ongoing capital inflows from external sources.

• In the crypto world, you can get something for nothing:
  

  you have some cash, and I have a “token”. The token is worthless. It has no purpose or function. There’s a big label on the token that says, “this token cannot be used for anything”. And we exchange the two, and so I end up with your cash, and you end up with nothing, and for some reason you’re happy with the transaction. ... This is a pretty accurate description of an “initial coin offering” (ICO) that has raised $200m worth of cryptocurrency. The company behind it is called block.one ... In an earlier post, we likened an initial coin offering to a Kickstarter campaign. Investors hand over their money, and in return get some sort of access to the product when it’s finished. The access is granted by a token that can be used with the software being developed. Block.one’s initial coin offering is different. There’s a token, but it can’t actually be used for anything. This is from the FAQs:
  

  The EOS Tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features, express or implied, including, without limitation, any uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features on the EOS Platform.

  You might want to read that over a couple of times, keeping in mind that investors have spent over $200m buying these “EOS Tokens”.

• From dot.comedy to ICOmedy…:
  

  mainstream media coverage of the crypto phenomenon has all focused on the similarities with the dotcom mania of the late 90s, which came to a head in the Spring of 2000. ... Sure, there was a mania, and stocks went to comical valuations, and thousands and thousands of people thought they had become overnight millionaires, only to discover they weren’t. Yes, it was tech-related and people were making fabulous predictions about how the world was going to change. ... But during the dotcom era it was clear that the world was changing, for real. Old skool, analogue businesses like Barnes & Noble were getting Amazon-ed. It was clear that all forms of business were already being revolutionised as the digital aged dawned. The trouble was that greed and a herd-like mentality sent the public markets potty for a time.
  
  The crypto craze is different. It has grown from fringe libertarian philosophy, preaching that any and all government is a bad thing, and that all our current systems where society is organised centrally will soon be replaced by loose ‘non-trusting’ digital networks and protocols that transcend the nation state. ... State sovereignty is not going to disappear. Democratic government is generally a good way for nations to organise their affairs. Dollars will buy you food and energy for the foreseeable.

• What does a crypto startup do with $230m?:
  

  You’ve probably never heard of Tezos before. It’s a “new decentralized blockchain” that’s apparently better than all the other blockchains, and last week, it completed a $230m fundraising. ... If the sum of money raised was a guarantor of success, then Tezos would now be a sure bet. It’s the biggest ICO to-date. The platform is the brainchild of Kathleen and Arthur Breitman, who previously worked at Accenture and Goldman Sachs respectively. They have been developing it through their venture Dynamic Ledger Solutions since 2014 and if they can get the Tezos blockchain running for three months “substantially as described” in their marketing, they and the other investors in DLS like venture capitalist Tim Draper will make $20m.

  What they will do with nearly a quarter of a billion dollars isn't clear. Ideas include "Acquire mainstream print and TV media outlets to promote and defend the use of cryptographic ledger in society"!

Ether price

Leaving aside the daily multi-million dollar heists, of which last Sunday's was $8.4M from Veritaseum, there is the opinion of one of Ethereum's co-founders that the speculative frenzy in Initial Coin Offerings is dangerous:

Initial coin offerings, a means of crowdfunding for blockchain-technology companies, have caught so much attention that even the co-founder of the ethereum network, where many of these digital coins are built, says it’s time for things to cool down in a big way.

“People say ICOs are great for ethereum because, look at the price, but it’s a ticking time-bomb,” Charles Hoskinson, who helped develop ethereum, said in an interview. “There’s an over-tokenization of things as companies are issuing tokens when the same tasks can be achieved with existing blockchains. People are blinded by fast and easy money.”

Firms have raised $1.3 billion this year in digital coin sales, surpassing venture capital funding of blockchain companies and up more than six-fold from the total raised last year, according to Autonomous Research. Ether, the digital currency linked to the ethereum blockchain, surged from around $8 after its ICO at the start of the year to just under $400 last month. It’s since dropped by about 50 percent.

The frenzy around ICOs using Ethereum was so intense that it caused a worldwide shortage of GPUs, but:

Over the past few months, there has been a GPU shortage, forcing the prices of mid-range graphics cards up as cryptocurrency miners from across the world purchased hardware in bulk in search for quick and easy profits.

This has forced the prices of most modern AMD and certain Nvidia GPUs to skyrocket, but now these GPUs are starting to saturate the used market as more and more Ethereum miners sell up and quit mining. Some other miners are starting to look at other emerging Cryptocurrencies, though it is clear that the hype behind Ethereum is dying down.

Earlier this week Ethereum's value dropped below $200, as soon as the currency experienced a new difficulty spike, making the currency 20% harder to mine and significantly less profitable. This combined with its decrease in value has made mining Ethereum unprofitable for many miners, especially in regions with higher than average electricity costs.

As I write, it is back around $225. If you are minded to invest, the FT's Alphaville blog just announced a great opportunity.