Key Takeaways
- ICO activity died down significantly after peaking in 2018.
- However, a new generation of crypto projects is reinventing the ICO concept.
- In 2025, crypto exchanges play a key role in distributing new coins.
The initial coin offerings (ICOs) era was supposed to be over, buried with the wreckage of the 2017–18 bubble.
Yet six years later, the fundraising model that defined crypto’s wildest boom is quietly resurfacing.
New launches like Yield Basis and Monad are pulling investors back in, hinting at a revival few saw coming.
How Did ICOs Die?
When blockchains were still a novel concept and the crypto community was in its infancy, there were relatively few projects seeking to raise money.
However, once the new technology garnered more mainstream attention, blockchain development began to snowball, as did the fundraising activity required to sustain it.
From just $222 million in 2016, total ICO volume ballooned to around $14 billion in 2018.
At the height of the frenzy, the EOS token sale raised $4.2 billion, eclipsing the three largest venture capital rounds of that year combined.
At a time when few institutions were interested in crypto, most of the funding came from retail investors.
When the market soured in late 2018, many ICO participants saw the value of their assets plummet.
In turn, this prompted regulatory scrutiny and the ensuing crackdown suppressed what little ICO momentum remained.
From 2018 onward, new crypto projects increasingly turned to venture capital funding in place of public sales.
Rather than selling coins to retail investors, platforms like Solana (SOL) favored private deals with a select group of institutions.
Meanwhile, the rise of airdrops and launchpads provided alternative distribution pathways for the new generation of memecoins and DeFi tokens.
The Role of Crypto Exchanges
Despite the collapse of the classic ICO model, a trickle of new blockchain projects continued to raise funds from the public after 2018.
However, the industry implemented new guardrails to prevent unscrupulous actors from abusing the public’s appetite for new cryptocurrencies.
In 2019, Binance Launchpool reimagined the way issuers connect with retail investors. In its role as an intermediary, the exchange acts in a curatorial capacity, ensuring that any new listings meet minimum standards.
Following Binance, OKX, Bybit, and KuCoin sought to emulate the centralized launchpad model. But faced with regulatory uncertainty, U.S. exchanges initially chose not to get involved.
With past crackdowns in the rear view, however, Kraken and Coinbase have finally joined the party.
Kraken Launch Debuts With Yield Basis
For its debut offering, Kraken selected YieldBasis (YB)—the utility token for a new DeFi yield protocol.
Developed by Curve founder Michael Egorov, Yield Basis borrows key elements from the decentralized stablecoin exchange to generate a yield of WBTC and ETH deposits.
In an interview with CCN, Egorov explained how Curve’s algorithmic foundation inspired the new platform.
“It occurred to me that […] if you use a similar algorithm to keep your leverage constant” via a BTC-stablecoin pool, “you create a position which is priced like BTC, without impermanent loss,” he said.
Starting with this idea, Egorov set about building a new platform, “and on the way, I improved a little bit on Curve tokenomics, and arrived at what Yield Basis is currently,” he recalled.
Coinbase Backs Monad as ICOs Return to the U.S.
Although the exchange has emphasized the regulatory compliance of its new ICO platform, for now, Kraken Launch isn’t available to U.S. users.
However, starting on Nov. 17, Coinbase plans to host a new token sale each month, with a focus on strictly vetted projects and regulatory compliance.
In a blog post, the firm boasted that “U.S. retail traders can now widely participate in public token sales for the first time since 2018.”
For its ICO debut, the American exchange selected Monad—a high-performance Layer 1 (L1) blockchain promising parallel execution and EVM compatibility.
With its mainnet launch scheduled for Nov. 24, Monad is among a new generation of blockchains reinvigorating L1 development.
The other major L1 ICO of 2025 is Nexchain, whcih has almost concluded a $50 million sale that started in March.
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James Morales is CCN’s blockchain and crypto policy reporter. He has been working in the news media since 2020, writing about topics such as payments, banking and financial technology. These days, he likes to explore the latest blockchain innovations and the evolving landscape of global crypto regulation.
With an educational background in social anthropology and media studies, James uses his platform as a journalist to explore how new technologies work, why they matter and how they might shape our future.
