Can confirm Counterparty can be used for a lot of stuff that most ICO bullshit is scamming people for.

• i'm making a DNS system with it https://github.com/chiguireitor/counterparty-dns
• You can use it for membership on forums or telegram channels https://github.com/chiguireitor/telly-kickbot
• You can use it as game tokens for special abilities or trading cards http://rarepepe.party/ http://rarepepedirectory.com/ and https://rarepepewallet.com (there are other games, like spells of genesis, age of rust,
   age of chains, etc., it's just that the pepe stuff is way too popular)
• You will eventually be able to run smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain be it on a turing complete https://counterparty.io/docs/faq-smartcontracts/ or a non-turing complete vm https://counterpartytalk.org/t/proof-of-concept-vm-development/3031
• You can even apostillate documents https://xchain.io/tx/986765 using broadcasts to timestamp them

So yeah, counterparty usage is very very much flexible enough to render most ICOs senseless, it's just that not enough people know.