Smells like 2018 spirit

Does history repeat itself? It certainly has a sense of irony. Coinbase announced the delisting of EOS, the living-dead network founded over 8 years ago by Dan Larimer (also co-founder of another defunct blockchain, Bitshares). For those with long memories, EOS is the network responsible for the largest token sale ever, raising over $4 billion in 2018. It was supposed to be the Ethereum-killer. Instead, it mostly marked the top of the local bull market and the end of the ICO craze.

EOS obviously never killed Ethereum and has struggled to achieve comparable network  activity, even compared to one of Ethereum's Layer-2s. Everything seems to be fine for the stakeholders, though — notably Block.one, which sits on a significant war chest of approximately 140,000 bitcoins and has at least succeeded in taking its subsidiary Bullish public in 2021.

What about EOS itself? It recently rebranded to Vaulta and shifted to being a Web3 banking platform with a new token, though market reception has so far remained limited.

The ICO cycle spins again

The irony is that we might just be at the beginning of a new ICO craze: Coinbase announced it would host from November 17 to November 22 the ICO of Monad network, a new Layer-1, making it accessible to U.S. retail investors (while excluding European ones). Monad plans to raise $188 million, after having already raised $244 million in private rounds, one led by Paradigm. This announcement follows Coinbase's acquisition of Echo, an application co-founded by well-known crypto investor "Cobie" that offers retail investors access to private equity rounds and token sales through whitelisted curators. Echo notably facilitated the $10 million token sale of MegaEth, an Ethereum Layer-2. The Echo acquisition signals Coinbase's intent to position itself as the gateway for retail participation in early-stage crypto projects: a lucrative position that could define this new cycle.

ICOs have certainly been one of the best ways to get rich, or at least richer, if we cherry-pick the most successful ones (remember Ethereum?). But many were primarily opportunities for private companies to create significant treasuries that could last decades, functioning more as hedge funds than revolutionary startups. Like private equity, there's no doubt that retail investors have an appetite for access to these offerings, and that appetite is legitimate. But also like private equity, fundamental questions persist regarding the rights provided by such tokens to investors.

The critical issue is alignment. Traditional equity investors have voting rights, information rights, and legal recourse. Token holders often receive none of these protections, despite taking on similar or greater risk. As this new ICO wave builds, there's an urgent need to introduce real alignment between shareholders' interests and token holders' interests. Without regulatory clarity or industry-imposed standards, retail investors may once again find themselves holding depreciating tokens while insiders and early investors cash out at their expense.

Monad will be an interesting case study. The project presents, on paper, actual technical differentiation from other infrastructure networks with its parallel execution model. But in this space, technical merit alone often isn't enough, especially compared to token price momentum.

It remains to be seen whether this new era of ICOs marks, once again, the top of the market. Retail enthusiasm returning to token sales has historically been a late-cycle phenomenon.