In this lecture, we will talk about ICO and types of tokensales
What is ICO (initial coin offering)?
A mechanism for attracting funding for projects or companies in order to develop and release a product (service) to the market. Investments are attracted in cryptocurrency (bitcoins, ether, litecoins, etc.).
As part of the ICO, the issuer of coins or, as they are also called, tokens, receives the necessary investments for the development of their project, offering investors in return certain services in the future, for example, software. In addition, investors can also count on the payment of dividends if the business is profitable, as well as income from the sale of purchased tokens if their rate rises.
ICO usually includes the following stages:
creation of a legal entity,
preparation of special documentation (Whitelist),
website development,
conducting an advertising campaign,
issuance of tokens.
In some cases, an investment risk assessment (Legal due diligence) is carried out, and tokens are placed on a special exchange for public sale.
The ICO technology largely repeats the IPO process.
An IPO is a public offering of shares on an exchange. And when buying these shares, investors receive a share in the company, and profit (dividends). And the presence of ICO tokens does not guarantee anything. The profit depends only on the increase in the value of the new altcoin on the trading platforms.
The distribution of tokens is carried out without any control from the legislature. That is why the “coin placement” area attracts scammers whose goal is to simply take money from gullible citizens, and most of the projects put up for ICO turn out to be soap bubbles.
The rise of scams and Ponzi schemes has led to a terrible fall in the popularity of ICOs. In 2018, a new fundraising method called IEO emerged as a replacement.
An IEO was similar to an ICO but was launched on a centralized exchange and came with the promise that the token would be listed on the exchange and investors would not be deceived. Moreover, in the IEO, crypto projects were carefully studied and the barrier of projects for conducting IEO was relatively high.
As a result, this created a trust factor among investors and the entire crypto community. IEOs have spawned some of the most popular blockchain projects to date, including Polygon and Elrond.
However, in 2019, when DEXs appeared, many crypto projects were attracted by the decentralized nature of these exchanges. As such, they become the best medium to launch tokens and raise funds without the complications of centralized exchanges.
This led to the birth of the IDO concept, for which the Raven protocol was the first project in history to launch IDO.
Then there were also IDO launch pads that offered services specifically for new IDO projects that included launchpads.
Launchpads are platforms where novice crypto projects can raise capital. Funds may be required for various purposes, such as finalizing or launching a crypto. Another goal of such actions is to create a crypto community that would unite developers and potential investors.
Such an approach will be a win-win for both parties — the creators receive the finances necessary for further work, and investors — early access to the new product, which, in the future, may have a high profit potential.
The current list of Launchpad and IDO can be viewed on the website
https://cryptorank.io/fundraising-platforms
You can search for IDOs through special aggregators such as CoinList. At the moment, it is a common practice that projects conduct tokensales on several sites at once.
CoinList is a web service where you can make financial transactions with fiat and digital currencies. In particular, users can trade and invest in new tokens, and at the stage of early access to them (during the ICO). This was the main reason for creating CoinList.
If you want to participate in the token sale without buying tokens, there are whitelists for that.
Whitelists are essentially a lottery for a place in a token sale. Usually, the majority of seats are played between token holders, and a minority — by random selection of people.
Anyone can take part in the Whitelist. Usually all this goes through the GLEAM platform. The list of things to do includes:
Subscribe to Twitter, Telegram, Telegram Chat, Post Retweet, To increase your chances — at the end there is a referral link for friends. More people will register through this link — more chances of passing.
Pros and cons of participating in tokensales

You can see the current tokensales on the website icodrops.com
On the icodrops site: Active ICOs, Upcoming ICOs and Completed ICOs.
You also need to understand that on a bullish market, project tokens rise and token distributions make a profit. In a bear market, the price of tokens drops very quickly and often the last splits barely cover investments or bring minimal profit. This is not always the case, there are strong projects that bring profit to early investors even in a bear market, or tokens that grow strongly over time. In any case, to succeed in the ISO market, you need to be 100% immersed in it, understand what is happening and diversify your portfolio as much as possible. Be careful.