ICOs soar as pump-and-dump cowboys trade on ‘next bitcoin’ FOMO

Why the hell did Bitcoin roar so much higher last week?

At one point, the price of this invisible, but highly speculative cryptocurrency was almost $4000. Sickening stories such as “if you had invested 50¢ in BTC seven years ago you’d be a quadruple bazillionaire” did the rounds and everyone felt a bit weird.

And while rivers of straight money (read: fiat currencies like the Australian dollar, US dollar and Japanese yen) have most certainly been giving Bitcoin another leg-up in its recent bull run, most of the action has been happening in secondary markets: which this newspaper helpfully described in 2014.

The latest frenzied, frothy churn that’s bubbling beneath the Bitcoin surface involves the buying and selling of ICOs, a new shiny crypto instrument.

ICOs are Initial Coin Offerings and one helpful journalist has described an ICO as what you’d get if Bitcoin and Kickstarter had a baby – it’s a crowd sale of a new crypto-asset.

Put another way, you know how Bitcoin is the asset that powers the blockchain? And Ether is the asset that powers the Ethereum network? People are basically now creating hundreds of new assets (called coins or tokens) that might power new, yet-to-be-developed peer-to-peer blockchain networks.

And because no one on earth wants to miss out on the “Bitcoin Millionaire” status ascribed to some early investors in Bitcoin, speculators are snapping up hundreds of different coins as soon as they are released. (Most of the ICOs are paid for with Ether, but some accept Bitcoin too and about $US380 million ($511 million) has been spent in these ICO channels).

It doesn’t seem to matter that some of these ICOs are no more than a one-page white paper explaining how the developers plan to use the cash they raise and have no actual product at all.

The prices of these fledgling, digital strings of code are rocketing higher and higher, before sometimes keeling over and dying as traders lose their nerve and cash out their Ether or Bitcoin.

But underneath this pump and dump game driven by crypto-hungry cowboys, are some particularly interesting ideas about how to use or build on decentralised blockchains.

One ICO that has gathered, what appears to be, genuine interest is the Basic Attention Token sale: a network enabling users to monetise their attention and personal information in the face of digital marketers.

Another is Zrcoin, a token backed by the physical production of zirconium oxide. Another is Gene-Chain, a platform for patients and researchers to securely store and exchange genomic data.

And a few more mainstream names are issuing ICOs.

Messaging app Kik Interactive, which boasts 300 million users, will release a token called “Kin” in an ICO this week. And cloud-storage start-up Storj raised nearly $US30 million in five days via an ICO.

But of course, this is all heady speculation and for every good idea there are hundreds of scams.

Matchpool ICO investors got a fright when the chief executive suddenly withdrew the 37,500 Ether ($8.9 million) raised without any explanation. And one crafty group are trading on the Rothschild name with “Rothschild Family LCF coins” purporting to streamline payments for Internet of Things devices.

No one knows how the legality of these things work and, like any speculative market, no one knows which project will actually get off the ground.

But the deep seeded FOMO that has gripped many who are dumbfounded by the run in Bitcoin suggests we are in for plenty more frenzied crypto-activity.