Christoph Jentzsch

There have been a lot of ICOs recently.

ICO stands for initial coin offering.

And there are very different opinions about if this is legal or not or good or bad.

But that's one of the main applications currently of Ethereum, I would say, in terms of what people use it for.

That's also what differentiates Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Bitcoin was always meant for being a virtual currency.

Currency meaning you exchange it to trade goods or something else.

Ethereum, on the other hand, does have a virtual currency named Ether, but its purpose is to be an open source platform in order to build decentralized applications, what we call DApps.

That's the purpose.

And people just used a very simple Dapp, which is just issuing a token, which you can do best on the Ethereum blockchain to fund their projects.

We have seen a lot of ICOs and some claim even to say the DAO was an ICO, but it actually really wasn't.

But the DAO collected $150 million worth of Ether.

So it was the largest crowdfunding back in its time.

And after this, there have been a lot of ICOs, basically crowdfunding projects,

getting Ether and in the beginning they kept their contract saying I do not want more than 5 million, 10 million, 12 million and they increased the cap over time.

So one example would be the BUD token for the Brave browser.

They raised I think it was 35 million in a couple of seconds, like 30 seconds or so.

I think they did choose a different model.

They said this is the price of one token.

As soon as they had Ether worth $35 million in, they just stopped it.