Imagine that you have a money box that costs $1 and you put a hundred dollar bill in it. Would you then sell this money box for $30? Of course not. So, how come that the market cap of the project that has collected $15M turns out to be less then $5M in a month after the end of the ICO? The answer is that instead of the money box all the funds goes into the pockets of the founders.

Almost every todays well-advertised ICO is there to make profits by selling the tokens, not to achieve long-term goals. Do you really think that founders really care about the value of their tokens on on exchanges? Of course not, as they have already done their businessthey got money from the investors. They do not have any responsibilities, however they will still claim that the project is going well.

Have you ever thought that founders could spend somewhere about 30% of all the raised funds for the promotion of their ICO? And that VCs are easily getting discounts up to 70%? This is all because founders do not have to care about the post-ICO period, and they are not really motivated to make their project a success.

The question is whether we (the crypto community) will put this to an end or not? Good news is that we definitely have the power to do it with implying the great concept that has been here for some time nowthe decentralized autonomous organization. Why not use a DAO as an intermediary between the startups and their investors? Each ICO could be a separate DAO, with all the raised funds residing in that DAO.

This is pretty much like the approach proposed by Vitalik Buterin earlier this year, which has never been widely used though. The reason for that is that not only we should have the protocol, but this protocol also needs to be well-trusted by the community and therefore widely adopted. Those startups that imply DAO-based ICOs should receive more attention from investors, while others would need to justify not using it.

Imagine that the tokens that you buy are literally backed by the raised funds, and startup team is highly motivated to do their best to make their project a success. If the majority of investors are unsatisfied with the results (say the token price on exchanges will go way lower than the ICO price) they could simply vote for the refund. This is the ICO 2.0 solution powered by the community-driven open-source Ethereum protocol proposed by the Daox Foundation (https://github.com/daox).

So it's in the favor of the crypto community to decide whether we keep ICOs fair and widely accessible for the masses or we just give it up for the variety of crypto funds and venture capitalists (who no doubt will find the way to secure their investments). But does it comply with the nature and the initial idea of ICOs to make investing and fundraising easily accessible for everyone in the world?

What do you think guys?