Next Year Crypto Will Wash Away the Stains of the ICO Boom

A remarkable amount of people began thinking crypto is a scam because of the initial coin offering (ICO) craze, which kicked off in 2017. It is largely true that that period was rife with sketchy projects. However, this coming year should help change that perception of the industry.

This post is part of CoinDesk’s “Crypto 2024” predictions package. Ryan Gorman is the founder of RGPR, a Web3 consultancy and head of strategy at Uranium3o.

Back then, many project founders lied about virtually everything, including their partnerships, intentions and actual products. Many were simply scams from the beginning. One exchange founder may have even faked his own deathH to make off with millions in stolen crypto.

This period was the Wild West and led to a lot of fair criticisms. The crypto industry was born from an ideal meant to counteract what many believe was the profiteering of traditional financial firms, only to turn into something even worse.

Since then, however, digital assets have become far more professionalized. Real builders emerged during the recent crypto winter that have created genuine opportunities for both crypto-natives and non-crypto-natives. A focus on real world assets (RWA) and real world use cases has emerged. Many recent projects have far more utility than most ICOs, it’s the difference between creating actual value and bolting the word “blockchain” onto a brand to juice its stock price.

The RWA market is massive, and tokenization is only getting started. This movement will forever change how people view and access investments — be they commodities, real estate, art, rare whiskey or any number of other things that have historically been bought or sold on opaque off-exchange or broker and auction dominated marketplaces.

The success of tokenization will change the perception of crypto as a whole.

Increased transparency

There are many commodities that have no spot or futures market, leading to opaque pricing that is more or less based on the whims of brokers as opposed to a clearing price where bids and asks meet. There may be a publicly available reference price, but often it is just a survey of what brokers think it should be.

Tokenizing assets, like metals, enables better price discovery and more accurate pricing because it creates a spot market where one did not…