Often, when you hear about altcoins for the first time, you hear about their initial coin offering, or ICO. What is an ICO? If you’ve got three minutes, we can explain. It starts with the bitcoin source code. Since it’s open source, and freely available, anybody can download it, make some modifications, and put out an altcoin of their own. These tokens are sold to gather the necessary capital to launch a business, in a cross between an initial public offering (IPO) and a Kickstarter. The big difference? The token, unlike a share of stock, only has value if we all agree it does. Our analysis of a thousand ICOs found that on average, they raise $12.5 million… but that half of them fail completely. Intrigued? Watch this video!
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