ICOs Make a Comeback

gm Bankless Nation,
ICOs are back with a vengeance.

Thanks to our new regulatory regime, we're running back ICOs. Today's piece from David digs into why the token sales of 2025 are technically superior to the ICOs of yesteryear and why they still beat out other popular modes to distribute tokens. He's pumped.

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Sponsor: Mantle — The Mantle Global Hackathon, running 10/22 to 12/31, invites devs & founders to design, build, and deploy scalable RWA and DeFi products on Mantle.

MegaETH. Monad. Aztec. Zama. Infinex.

These are not some backwater trend-following beta projects. 

These are some of the biggest, most reputable, trend-setting projects in crypto. Founders with reputations at stake, building novel frontier technology. 

And they’re all doing, or have done, public token sales. 

ICOs are, in my opinion, the purest mechanism for token distribution that the market can come up with. That’s why the crypto market discovered them early in its development – in 2017.

Token sales just make sense.

Investors purchase tokens at a price, take on their fair share of risk, and can enjoy the upside they earned. Exchanging capital for ownership is a fundamentally sound, logically consistent mechanism for distributing ownership and raising capital. Airdrops, yield farming, and points programs are all problematic distortions and contortions of the market – game-able, exploitable, and unsustainable. 

My first job in crypto was at an ICO advisory company. I wrote blogs and was the community manager for a handful of ICOs. I watched first-hand as our executive leadership pulled the fire alarm at the company, after our lawyers said that the company is basically assisting these ‘startups’ in conducting unregistered securities offerings. I didn’t do any meaningful work for over a quarter of the year, and then the company laid 65% of its workforce off.

Which is not to say that the ICO mania ended only because of securities regulation. It ended because a few good ICOs proved to the market that you could raise a bunch of money, and it attracted a bunch of bad ICOs to come exploit this fact.

Enter the Gensler era, and the market never returned to what is a fundamentally correct way of trading capital for risk, and instead did these weird contorted maneuvers to effectively distribute ownership to the interested public – often through the hands of economic middlemen like sophisticated yield farmers and industrial airdrop farmers. 

Finally, with the new administration, we can return back to what capital markets have known for years – public sales are the best mechanism for distributing assets. Even more fortunately, in 2025, we now have eight years of auction mechanism design to create accurate and fair price discovery in public token offerings. 

Aztec and Uniswap have really pioneered this here, with the Uniswap CCA mechanism, which is probably the strongest liquidity bootstrapping mechanism I have seen to date. A Uniswap CCA is an auction mechanism that creates and distributes a token, over a long period of time, that still encourages early bidding over late bidding, while still preventing sniping or timing games, or rewarding sophisticated actors – an onchain price discovery mechanism for an asset that has not yet seen the light of the market. 

For more sophisticated actors, a Uniswap CCA lets you express control of your desired valuation, by letting you get in at the earliest possible opportunity and capping the max valuation of your desired bid. For those who just want to market buy, and receive the average valuation as all other participants (which was my choice for the Aztec ICO), that is the default normal path. In both cases, the Uniswap CCA spreads out your bid for the entirety of the remaining time of the auction, eliminating the option to buy more tokens before others.

The price of the token can, and will, tick upwards as the auction goes on, correlated to the amount of capital that has been bid.  Ultimately, at the last block of the auction, everyone will be buying the same amount of tokens for the same amount of capital. Those who arrived at the auction earlier got earlier access to a lower price, but this is happening at a slow enough rate, and at a low enough slope, that I don’t think anyone can complain. 

But whatever – you can learn more about a Uniswap CCA on your own time. The real point is… ICOs are fucking back baby. 

It’s important to emphasize that these are some of the industry's best projects at the moment, launching tokens through other high-reputation platforms, like Uniswap and Coinbase. 

We still need to rid the world of investor accreditation laws, but at least capital formation is happening the way it should be – with direct, un-intermediated relationships between those putting capital at risk, and teams working hard to deliver value. 

I hope this trend continues, and look forward to co-investing with you all!

📈 The Asset

• BitMine added $150M in ETH to its treasury holdings
• ETHval, a new Ethereum valuation dashboard, introduced community rankings
• Etherealize published an analytical report on the institutional potential of L2s
• Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager, unveiled a tokenized version of a €5 billion money market fund
• WisdomTree unveiled its Physical Lido Staked ETH ETP

🏛️ The Protocol

• The Beacon Chain turned five years old, with 100% uptime along the way
• Prysm faced a temporary bug, but Ethereum kept finalizing fine thanks to client diversity
• Vitalik opined that Fusaka’s PeerDAS implementation is sharding

📱 The Apps

• Aave considers delisting USDS while it also weighs pulling back multichain strategy
• Coinbase launched instant unstaking for users, letting them pay a 1% fee to bypass queues
• Lighter perpetual exchange launched Spot markets, with ETH as the first depositable asset
• Maple's yield-bearing syrupUSDT token went live on Aave’s Core Instance, following deployment on Plasma
• MetaMask introduced Transaction Shield subscription: up to $10K loss protection on DeFi, NFTs, airdrops, though not smart contract exploits
• Uniswap integrated Revolut for direct crypto buys with 0% fees via Revolut Pay
• Yearn faced an exploit against its yETH stableswap pool

🤐 The Privacy Stack

• Aztec begins its token sale through Uniswap’s Continuous Clearing Auction
• Shutter is launching an encrypted mempool to protect against malicious MEV

🐸 The Culture

• The Ethereum Foundation hosted a livestream viewing party for Fusaka upgrade

💽 The Tech

• Base officially deployed its Base-Solana Bridge
• Optimism launched its Jovian hard fork
• The Ethereum ecosystem reached a new ATH of 32,950 TPS
• Taiko achieved 100% ZK coverage
• ZKsync’s Interop now allows ZK Stack chains to readily access liquidity on Ethereum

Bitcoin hit a rare signal this week, dropping to its cheapest level relative to gold in nearly 15 years. Is that a buy signal or something deeper in the macro picture?

Ryan and David break down what the BTC/gold anomaly really means, how liquidity, rates, and Trump’s surprise Fed Chair pick factor in, and whether the market is entering a shallow cycle instead of a true winter.

Tune into this week’s Rollup! 👇

Mantle Global Hackathon 2025: Mantle has entered a new phase in its roadmap – becoming the distribution layer to connect TradFi and onchain liquidity for RWAs where real-world finance flows. To accelerate this vision, Mantle launched the Mantle Global Hackathon 2025, running from October 22 to December 31, 2025, inviting developers, founders, and innovators to design, build, and deploy scalable RWA and DeFi products on Mantle.