Delphi Labs seeks CEO to make ICOs great again

Delphi Labs
3 min readSep 15, 2023

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Launching tokens and raising funds is arguably crypto’s killer use case. And it all began with ICOs. With them, anyone could contribute to a founder’s dream.

It didn’t matter where you worked, who you knew, or how much money was in your bank account. If you held ETH, you could fund a startup anywhere in the world.

The earliest ICOs were reasonably priced and created immediate community alignment. But the model worked too well. ICOs soon began to attract too much attention and capital, and too many bad actors. Eventually, murky regulations made it infeasible to offer compliant public sales at all.

For better or worse, that’s left us in a place where VCs gobble up pre-seeds, seeds, and half a dozen rounds in backroom deals before tokens finally launch to the public. And when they do, they typically land on a CEX with valuations in the billions. That turns retail into exit liquidity…

Founders face significant fundraising problems at the moment, too. The shifting regulatory landscape makes it hard to know how to raise funds and launch the token in a compliant way without getting sued by some 3-letter-agency a few years down the road. The potential pool of investors is limited to angels and VCs. And successive private rounds lead to inflated valuations, which all but ensure their tokens are destined for down-only mode.

Then there’s the effect this fundraising model has on the community’s involvement. Retail is left to buy in when a lot of upside has already been extracted. That leads to far lower (aligned) community involvement than during the ICOs days where people who were able to get in early became missionaries and/or contributors to the projects.

It doesn’t have to be this way. All founders should have a straightforward and compliant path to raising funds from anyone. And it’s our mission to democratize capital formation by making ICOs great again.

To do this, the industry needs a new platform for taking protocols public… one that:

  • Sets a new and globally-recognized standard for initial token offerings.
  • Gives everyone access to invest in the highest quality projects at the same stage as VCs.
  • Ensures projects are able to raise funds and launch their tokens in a compliant way.
  • Includes standardized and transparent information on every listing including token unlocks, allocations, voting rules, resource usage, etc.
  • Aligns early buyers with the protocol’s DAO (if applicable), much as Vitalik Buterin envisioned in his DAICO proposal.
  • Adheres to frequently changing regulations.
  • Guides projects on how to perform the best fundraise/launch possible.

We want everyone to have a chance to make it. To get there, we need a leader who can break down walls. We need someone who recognizes the initial token offerings will one day replace initial stock offerings, and is willing to lead the team that helps make it happen.

Does the idea give you goosebumps? Does it inspire you to make ICOs great again? Then, let’s chat!

Apply with the link below or DM @lukedelphi or @Bitcoin_Sage now. Together, we can return to our roots and take crypto back to the people 🦾

https://delphilabs.io/careers#apply

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Delphi Labs
Delphi Labs

Written by Delphi Labs

The next evolution of incubation leveraging our hivemind of expertise at @delphi_digital

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