John. R. Willett is considered to be the inventor of the ICO. He was the first, who used this abbreviation to refer to new forms of attracting investment in the form of a sale to investors, a fixed number of new units of crypto-currencies.
Throughout the ICO any team of the project is selling digital tokens for crypto-currencies or fiat (real) money (as dollars, euro) among investors. Coming after these coins can be applied on the platform of the project as the local money or traded on exchanges. ICO is also often called as crowdsale. It is a digital (virtual) currency, which unit is coin. The coin is protected from tampering, as it represents encrypted information, a copy of which is impossible. Crypto-currency is issued directly to the network and has nothing to do with any normal currency or any state currency system.
In 2013, the bachelor of computer science from Seattle launched a communication protocol and a crypto-money, Mastercoin, now known as OMNI. Initial Coin Offering went pretty well, the capitalization of the program amounted to $500,000, which quickly turned into 5 million, thanks to the progress of bitcoin. According to Willett, the financial value of bitcoin has increased in 10 times and the same thing happened with released Mastercoin token, which price has increased in 100 times. New adventure of this creator of all modern startups (in 2017 ICO has attracted 201st project with the help of which, the team managed to raise $3 031 120 416 investment) became UpToken, issued by the Coinme Company on Oct 16, 2017. This is a new crypto-currency that will be in use in the network of cryptomate Coinme. The concept of the Willet and his partners is to organize the work of the cryptomate all over the world. Willett believes that during the current “gold rush”, as in the previous, one may not dig gold, but make money by selling shovels. He also thinks about creation of a single worldwide network of cryptomate for everyone to easily buy, sell or exchange the crypto-currency.
