Bankless The Return of the ICO | Ryan & David
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Dec 10, 2025 ICOs are making a comeback with improved mechanics and real projects. The hosts explore innovations like on-chain auctions and how they can prevent past mistakes from the 2017 boom. They detail new public sales from MegaEth, Monad, Aztec, Zama, and Infinex, highlighting unique auction formats and community-based allocations. Discussions on regulatory frameworks and the rise of Ethereum as a capital market center reveal a shift toward fair price discovery. The potential for the future of decentralized capital formation is both exciting and thought-provoking.
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Capital Formation Is Core To Crypto
- Capital formation is a core money verb of crypto alongside holding and transacting.
- ICOs historically unlocked network funding and are resurfacing with better infrastructure and mechanisms.
Auction R&D Enables Better ICOs
- Eight years of auction R&D now enable fairer on-chain token price discovery.
- Major players like Coinbase and Uniswap are building auction infrastructure that projects use.
SpankChain's Early Auction Lesson
- David recounts participating in the SpankChain ICO in 2017 and praises its strike-price auction.
- He highlights that the mechanism allocated tokens only to willing buyers, avoiding oversubscription chaos.