If you you're interested in ICO's, you're few years too late to this train. Now there is DeFi projects on the wave, maybe it's worth to take look on it. But I'm not familiar enough with it to suggest something.
It also depends on how much money you want to invest. Like mining, it requires big investments, cheap electricity, and in the end returns that you'll get isn't that big.
It's difficult to suggest something specific for investment when I don't know what range of money for investment you have. It may be $10 000, $50 000 or just $1000.
HODLing isn't worst option, considering how much crypto went up in recent months. And at least you're not risking to lose your investment
let us assume if its 2,500,000 USD?
If that the initial funds, then numbers 1 and 3 will be better to do.
With hodl, you can buy bitcoin at the downtrend and store it in your cold wallet.
With staking, you can buy many coins at the market and start staking that coin. You can choose to use your own wallet or you can stake using the platform from the project. But you should search for the coin to stake because there are so many coins that you can stake now.
Do you want to sponsor the project or you want to create a new project?
I prefer the two ways I mentioned before and not trying to sponsoring the new project.
About mining, you need to prepare many things such as buying high-end hardware which can help you to get a good reward, calculate how much electricity cost, a place for your mining hardware and better that place is cold so your machine is not heating.
But the important is DYOR.