原文来源： ANAGRAM
原文标题：Bring ICO's Back: Distributed Token Launches (DTL's)
编译：TechFlow, 深潮
Venture capitalists have never innovated in their funding structures, they have just found ways to invest in companies earlier than ever before. Don't get me wrong, VCs injecting capital into early-stage technology undoubtedly accelerates innovation, but it comes at the expense of the communities the product serves.
Cryptocurrency itself is a technology with novel properties that requires permissionlessness, composability, and decentralization. These new features open up new opportunities to support self-funded technologies. With the advent of new technologies and new needs, creative thinking about capital formation is emerging for the first time since IPOs.
In 2017, token offerings (ICOs) began to gain traction and quickly gained traction among investors. However, the 2018 bear market arrived, and many projects and their tokens collapsed. The collapse of the ICO has also drawn severe scrutiny from the public, institutions, and even the most important regulators.
Traditional venture capital structures have resurfaced as decentralized retail funding has dwindled and new sources of funding have emerged.
On this path, intermittent funding mechanisms were tried: Initial DApp Offerings (IDOs) and Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs). But against the backdrop of negative public perception sparked by ICOs, crypto funding skewed towards private rounds, further excluding the community. Today's crypto funding looks a lot like traditional venture capital — from seed rounds to Series A to Series B and all the way to token offerings.
Venture capital is a powerful mechanism for financing innovation. The current wave of venture capital investment has kept valuations climbing, providing founders with significant capital to build great new products and technologies. We have participated in many of these funding rounds and have seen our portfolio companies make a real difference in the world. But on the other hand, we are also aware that this highly valued venture capital investment restricts the community from participating in any meaningful way.
The involvement of venture capital does not need to die out, and in many cases is necessary to build early-stage projects on cutting-edge technologies for survival. But when capital pours into the crypto space for providing asymmetric opportunities, foundations compete for returns rather than persistence.
In a sense, private capital will dump the communities that will make or break these new ventures. Community members and small retail investors, not private funds, are critical to the future of any network. Decentralization happens because of them – the community and the builders. Users and owners should overlap as much as possible.
The power of micro-communities
In essence, microcommunities are small, focused groups of like-minded people who delve into specific interests or goals. In the crypto space, these micro-communities can raise billions of value spontaneously and often represent the fringes most likely to become initial holders. For example, the Ordinals community has created tremendous interest in the Bitcoin ecosystem and has driven the emergence of new projects, such as Bitcoin-based stablecoins, while network activity, especially in the form of fees, has surged. Ordinals were created as a by-product of spontaneous experimentation of user interest in the public market.
In the case of Meme, Bonk was created as a community reward token alongside Bonk Bot (a trading app developed for Telegram), which eventually led to the creation of six more DApps that supported Bonk and opened up a novel funding mechanism for Pump.fun to leverage community-generated memes to reach escape velocity. Bonk rewards users across Solana by enabling them to become owners through revenue generation from the Bonk ecosystem, paving the way for the construction of a potentially unlimited number of other products. In both cases, organic distribution and fair, decentralized financing create value, which leads to greater interest and further experimentation, which in turn translates into more value. People care about projects that they feel aligned with, which leads to further creativity and growth in these ecosystems.
What we can learn from Memes
- Allocation to build communities
- Community building and demanding value
- Build products for the community
- Communities become more valuable
- Investors want to invest in communities and new projects built in the ecosystem
- The initial meme becomes more valuable
Democratize funding
Crypto bootstrapping is possible and can transcend the boundaries of traditional funding methods. For example, crypto startups have an extremely low barrier to entry. A set of smart contracts and a powerful idea can fundamentally upend a traditional system and change the world, which means that there will be a lot of new companies emerging, but it also means a rapid development of innovation – knowledge is open source, and existing breakthroughs become useful components of the new system. Crypto projects have a uniquely high leverage from a human capital perspective. Traditional companies tend to scale linearly. Uber's growth requires more drivers to serve more riders. Low-level open-source infrastructure can be built by one person and used by billions of people.
Since these are often highly leveraged manpower protocols and are more like cities than corporations, democratizing money, while suitable for any business, finds an ideal starting point in crypto. ICOs are an amazing mechanism for capital formation in crypto that are supposed to be here to stay. They put their tokens in the hands of the community early on. They decentralize the web early on. They reduce the concentration of ownership from the start.
Yes, some didn't go very well. But this is no different from traditional investing, especially venture capital investments. In fact, it's better. More than 90% of venture capital projects are at zero or have no motivation to continue to progress. However, only 47% of ICO investments go to zero. The difference is that in the crypto space, we can all witness this catastrophe first-hand in a liquid market. In traditional venture capital, disaster is overshadowed by a (hopefully) well-performing fund.
Destablecoin Offering (DTL)
The core focus of DTL is to put the token and its technology in the hands of real users, not just speculators. The latter is inevitable, but in any case, the end user should be central. This ideal version is not to use any financial capital at all. Airdrop on day one. It's free to give out GitHub commits. Provide a 3% token supply to CTOs on Twitter in exchange for tasks, provide ownership on jokerace, crowdsource top shitposters on farcaster by voting.
Priority should be given to token giveaways to attract talent, whatever form it takes, and builders to join the project, not just an ordinary "ecosystem fund" that takes four years to fully unlock. Instead, tokens under this strategy are immediately ready to go, with the goal of bringing talent into the ecosystem on day one, such as hiring a CFO or head of developer relations. While we don't currently have a three-step process to upend the funding model and a playbook that guarantees the best possible launch, we're putting some of the ideas here into practice. More coming soon...
summary
For the first time in the history of finance, there has been a system that rewards permissionless system experimentation through an ever-growing set of institutional tools, and allows institutions, currencies, and irrevocable contracts to be created in a rapid and technically precise manner. We should avoid downplaying the impact of this permissionless value creation. Decentralization and long-term coordination occur at the intersection of communities and builders, and the two groups should overlap as much as possible. In the crypto space, one of the main motivations is to build a community with financial incentives that empower it to build a future where products serve their needs rather than rent-seeking monopolies. To motivate this community, they must be prioritized in their fundraising strategy. Blockchain is a distributed database that builds trust through large-scale collaboration rather than through a single powerful authority that retains control and censorship – let's take advantage of these unique features. We believe that blockchain has become a melting pot of powerful economic tools whose scale we have yet to fully comprehend, and reinventing new systems of transaction and collaboration in this context is a worthwhile endeavour.