A perspective from an economist

Secondary markets like the current IOTA/BTC market are essential to the primary market of the ICO. If there was no secondary market, the primary market would struggle. Imagine an ICO where investors know they will later not be able to sell their shares.

This link between primary and secondary market is not binary -- linked or not linked -- but instead very gradual: the more liquid a secondary market (and/or the higher the price), the better for for the primary market. If you think of the ICO as the initial primary market and today's market as the secondary market: without the expectation of the market today at the time of the ICO, the initial ICO market would not have existed (are much less of it).

In the nex step, you can think of today's market as the primary market and tomorrow's market as the secondary market. The logic is the same: the more liquid we expect the future market to be, the better for today's market (--> higher price today). This link is present from today to the (infinite) future.

The main lesson here is: any investor at any time always adds value to a project. Investors play an essential role for crypto projects in general, invluding IOTA. Of course, the coding is much more important. But the code would never come to its full potetnial wthout investors. Investors provide the financial incentive for all the devs in a project. Granted, there are incentives at work other than the financial one. But the financial incentive is rather important: after all, people have to eat from time to time.

Investors and developers live in a symbiosis.