ICO
Initial Coin Offering — public token sale by a project before or right after launch. The dominant fundraising model in crypto during 2017.
Aliases: initial coin offering, token sale
ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is a fundraising format where a project sells its native token directly to investors, usually in exchange for ETH, BTC, or fiat. The peak year was 2017, when whitepaper-stage projects raised tens of billions of dollars.
Basic mechanic
- Team publishes whitepaper, tokenomics, schedule.
- Opens a sale contract or payment gateway.
- Investor sends ETH / BTC and receives the token at a fixed price (or on a bonding curve).
- After the sale ends, the token lists on an exchange and the held supply starts trading.
Pros & cons
Pros:
- Team raises capital without diluting equity (selling tokens, not shares).
- Investors gain early entry.
- Global access — none of the geographic gating an IPO has.
Cons:
- 2017 was effectively unregulated; large numbers of scam projects with copy-pasted whitepapers.
- Many tokens had no real utility and collapsed 90–99% from ICO price.
- The SEC and other regulators retroactively classified some ICO tokens as unregistered securities, forcing teams into fines and refunds.
Telegram’s 2018 ICO: TON
Context relevant to this project. In 2018, Telegram ran the largest ICO in history — $1.7B to launch TON (Telegram Open Network). The SEC blocked the U.S. portion in 2019, calling Gram tokens unregistered securities. In 2020 Telegram abandoned the launch and refunded investors.
The community picked up the open-source code and shipped the network as The Open Network (without Telegram). That is today’s TON.
ICO vs IDO vs IEO
- ICO — sale directly by the team, typically via their own site.
- IEO (Initial Exchange Offering) — sale via a centralised exchange (Binance Launchpad, Bybit Launchpad). The exchange filters projects.
- IDO (Initial DEX Offering) — sale via a decentralised launchpad (Raydium Launchpad, DAO Maker, etc).
Pure ICOs are rare after 2018 — most moved into IDO/IEO formats with more infrastructure support.
What remains relevant
ICO survives as a generic term — people sometimes call any first sale of a new token “an ICO”. Legally and operationally, the modern variants are quite different from the 2017 norm.