Hi Steemit,
I'm no professional, but I'd like to offer a brief personal analysis on ICO's, particularly their value vs. Ethereum
Some quick stats about ICO's
- Several recent ICOs have generated millions of dollars of crowdfunded investment in a matter of days.
- A common criticism of ICO's is that many receive their massive funding all at once, instead of distributed funding per project milestone. Many of these projects don't even have a working prototype.
- While most well known ICO's have preformed great by traditional metrics, as of this article only about 24% of ICO'S have outperformed Ethereum since their debut according to ICO stats.
Whats The Takeaway here?
It's difficult to say, because no ICO has fully matured to the point of rolling out a complete product. Promising programs like Golem are still in very early stages, and decentralized storage attempts like Storj and Sia have yet to truly go mainstream.
In the long run, some ICO tokens may end up being a great return on your initial investment, but it's questionable how many will surpass Ethereum in raw utility and value. My personal advice is to invest in projects you believe in, but invest conservatively, especially if you're using Ether to make your investments.
Case 1- Look at all that green! ICOS are certainly doing great!
Case 2- Uh oh...when we compare these ICO tokens to Ethereum they're still doing great, but few are giving a higher return than just the same amount of Ethereum held from the point of the token offer.
Hope this article gave everyone some insights. I'd love to field some thoughts/questions in the comments. -C