An ICO is a new form of fundraising that has become increasingly popular since May of 2016. The whole point of the ICO is to democratize the investment process while lowering risk to investors in ways that were not possible for early stage projects. In order to conduct an ICO, a digital coin or token on top of a blockchain* is created. This coin is typically correlated to the growth of a company or product. After the coin is created, this coin or token is offered for sale in an initial offering. 

The token can be purchased by anyone in the world and, upon expiration of any relevant holding period, trades on secondary markets in a peer-to-peer fashion. This gives investors from countries anywhere in the world the ability to take part in early-stage ventures while fostering liquid markets for investors to be able to trade with one another. 

The secondary market tradability means that, in many cases, investors are no longer locked into an early-stage investment until there is an exit, but instead can sell any percentage off into the market at any time, lowering the risk to investors. 

Even where there are initial lock-ups and holding periods, the peer-to-peer, global marketplace for tokens makes them superior to traditional offerings in terms of transparency, liquidity, ease of transfer, and price discovery. 

Initial coin offerings (ICO) became increasingly popular in late 2016 and into 2017. 

The first ICO was held by Mastercoin in July 2013, raising a respectable $500,000. Considering it was the first ICO and not many knew what an ICO was at the time, it was considered a sucess. 

Ethereum raised money with a token sale in 2014, raising 3,700 BTC in its first 12 hours, equal to approximately $2.3 million at the time. 

In May of 2017, the ICO for a new web browser called Brave generated about $35 million in under 30 seconds. 

Following a speculative boom in cryptocurrency prices that peaked in December 2017, regulation of cryptocurrencies has since been rapidly changing.

A blockchain is a digital record of transactions. The name comes from its structure, in which individual records, called blocks, are linked together in single list, called a chain. Blockchains are used for recording transactions made with cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, and have many other applications.

First and foremost, blockchain is a public electronic ledger built around a P2P (peer-topeer) system that can be openly shared among disparate users to create an unchangeable record of transactions, each time-stamped and linked to the previous one.

By design, a blockchain is resistant to modification of its data. This is because once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without alteration of all subsequent blocks.

A blockchain is typically managed by a peer-topeer network collectively adhering to a protocol for inter-node communication and validating new blocks. The blockchain has been described as “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way”.

The blockchain was invented by a person (or group of people) using the name Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 to serve as the public transaction ledger of the cryptocurrency bitcoin. The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto remains unknown. The invention of the blockchain for bitcoin made it the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without the need of a trusted authority or central server.

The bitcoin design has inspired other applications and blockchains that are readable by the public and are widely used by cryptocurrencies. The blockchain is considered a type of payment rail.

Bitcoin has since grown to almost a $1 trillion market cap and has the potential to grow to be a bedrock of the worldwide record-keeping systems, despite being launched just 10 years ago.