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Sick of hearing about bitcoin? Well it’s unlikely to be any different next year, and ICOs, the latest cryptocurrency fad, will be impossible to escape too.
This year, Jamie Foxx, Paris Hilton and Floyd Mayweather all promoted “initial coin offerings”. Named to mimic initial public offerings, where firms raise money in exchange for shares, ICOs allow companies to swap tokens for cash. These tokens are forms of cryptocurrency secured using a blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin.
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What does a token get you? It varies. For Filecoin, a company that raised more than $250 million from an ICO earlier this year, the tokens let you trade hard drive space. If you have a few spare gigabytes on your home PC, you could lend them out to other people as cloud storage in exchange for Filecoin tokens.
People who buy tokens during an ICO are banking on their value