2017.08.22 什么是首次代币发行？

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What are initial coin offerings?
Proponents of crypto-currency-based projects hope that they could one day replace today’s tech giants

Aug 22nd 2017

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By L.S.

WOULD you like to invest in Filecoin, a marketplace for digital storage services? Or Indorse, a professional social network where members own their data? How about Lust, a service “to enable all human beings on Earth to find their perfect sexual partner anonymously?” These are just three of a wave of what are called initial coin offerings (ICOs). More than $2bn has already been invested in such offerings since the first one, in 2013. And there is more to come: Smith + Crown, a consultancy, lists more than 200 ICOs on its website. What are they and why are they so successful?

The term ICO is somewhat misleading: these flotations are quite different from the similar-sounding “initial public offerings”, or IPOs, when startups list on a stock exchange. Whereas investors in shares receive ownership rights, those who put their money in ICOs get crypto-currency, or tokens issued on a blockchain, an indelible distributed ledger of the kind that underpins bitcoin. They are meant to serve as the currency for the project they finance: to pay for storage space on Filecoin, for example. They can also be traded by speculators; investors hope that successful projects will cause tokens’ value to rise. In early August Filecoin raised $252m in just over 30 minutes. The ICO does not end until September 7th and yet its price has already more than quadrupled, to more than $6 (the price is determined by the level of demand, though the tokens cannot be traded during the ICO).


Another big difference is that most ICOs are unregulated. Instead of providing an audited prospectus, for instance, issuers just publish a “white paper” which often describes the project’s aspirations in glowing terms. Regulators are getting antsy. In July America’s Securities and Exchange Commission said that the tokens issued last year by the DAO, one of the first ICOs, constituted securities—signalling to future ICOs that they may be subject to securities law. And even such crypto-currency gurus as Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, the blockchain technology used by most ICOs, sees a bubble that is bound to pop one day.

Yet this doesn’t mean that ICOs are bad: this bubble, like the dotcom one, could spawn promising companies and technologies. The big hope is that ICOs will give rise to decentralised organisations that could one day disrupt the tech giants. At their heart, argues Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, a venture-capital firm, these are gigantic centralised databases, keeping track of products and purchase histories (Amazon), users and their friends (Facebook) or web content and search queries (Google). ICOs and their tokens are a way to fund and build alternatives. Filecoin is one such project: subscribers will use the currency to pay for file storage, but can also earn it by contributing storage to the network themselves. ICOs may indeed be a bubble, but perhaps a mostly healthy one, generating much innovation.



什么是首次代币发行？
基于加密货币的项目的支持者希望他们有一天能够取代今天的科技巨头

2017年8月22日


作者：L.S.

你是否愿意投资于数字存储服务市场Filecoin？或者Indorse，一个会员拥有其数据的专业社交网络？Lust，一个 "让地球上所有的人都能匿名找到他们的完美性伴侣 "的服务，怎么样？这些只是被称为首次代币发行（ICOs）的浪潮中的三个。自2013年第一次发行以来，已经有超过20亿美元的资金投入到此类发行中。而且还有更多。咨询公司Smith + Crown在其网站上列出了200多个ICOs。它们是什么，为什么它们如此成功？

ICO这个词有些误导性：这些发行与听起来相似的 "首次公开募股"（IPO）完全不同，后者是初创企业在证券交易所上市。股票投资者获得的是所有权，而那些把钱投入ICO的人获得的是加密货币，或在区块链上发行的代币，这是一种不可磨灭的分布式账本，是比特币的支柱。它们旨在作为它们所资助的项目的货币：例如，支付Filecoin的存储空间。它们也可以由投机者进行交易；投资者希望成功的项目将导致代币的价值上升。8月初，Filecoin在短短30多分钟内筹集了2.52亿美元。ICO直到9月7日才结束，但其价格已经翻了四倍多，达到6美元以上（价格由需求水平决定，尽管代币在ICO期间不能交易）。


另一个很大的区别是，大多数ICO是不受监管的。例如，发行人不提供经审计的招股说明书，而只是发表一份 "白皮书"，通常以华丽的语言描述项目的愿望。监管机构正变得焦躁不安。7月，美国证券交易委员会表示，首批ICO之一的DAO去年发行的代币构成了证券--向未来的ICO发出信号，它们可能受到证券法的约束。甚至像以太坊（大多数ICO使用的区块链技术）的创造者维塔利克-布特林（Vitalik Buterin）这样的加密货币大师，也看到了有一天必然会破裂的泡沫。

然而，这并不意味着ICO是坏事：这个泡沫，就像互联网泡沫一样，可以催生有前途的公司和技术。最大的希望是，ICO会催生出去中心化的组织，有朝一日能颠覆科技巨头。风险投资公司Union Square Ventures的Albert Wenger认为，这些组织的核心是巨大的集中式数据库，记录产品和购买历史（亚马逊）、用户和他们的朋友（Facebook）或网络内容和搜索查询（谷歌）。ICOs及其代币是一种资助和建立替代方案的方式。Filecoin就是这样一个项目：用户将使用该货币支付文件存储，但也可以通过自己为网络贡献存储来获得该货币。ICOs可能确实是一个泡沫，但也许是一个基本健康的泡沫，产生了许多创新。