Guys what are your thought about STO ? Are security tokens a more interesting vehicle of investment than utility token ?
After taking time for much needed reflection on the past years, I have come to the conclusion ICOs failed because there is no incentive for the project teams to create any value for the investors, as the utility tokens are not allowed to increase in value. Would they be sold with the intention to increase in value, they were at risk of being deemed securities. And securities come with regulatory oversight and cannot be sold on unregistered exchanges. Additionally in contrast to shares utility tokens do not grant any rights other than access to the product. So you understand why being labeled a security or equity was to be avoided. Even though the teams could sell their unsold tokens on the secondary market, that would just be a bonus. The focus was to raise as much capital as possible before the regulatory ban hammer came down while pretending to be productive. Obviously raising money riding the hype was much easier than actually building a product that could give the utility tokens any value.
Security tokens grant right to dividends, however I am not sure they give a significantly bigger guarantee to ROI compared ICOs. Why? Security tokens still do not grant any voting rights nor any rights to company assets. Therefore security token teams still do not have to have any responsibility as the relation with their investors harbors no threat, liability or urgency. We can only hope the dividends increase the incentive a little bit for the teams to build some value for security tokens.
Great thoughts! It is true that utility token is to incentivize (usually) the people handling the network, but the team has not interest as if they are a normal company, they will do revenue in another way. This is what happens with Ripple. The team/company does not care what can happen to XRP. Because they make money without using this crypto.
We can discuss a long time to find other problems: the fact that there was a bubble was also a problem! Raising millions with a basic website was easy. Also, utility were listed months, if no years before any product to be delivered, so it is basically only a speculative market. Listing a utility token ONLY when a product is live, and the token is used within it, would have been better for ICO and for the market.
As you said, the problem with STO is the ROI... you can forget about x1000.
Therefore, maybe the truth is in the middle : to always have two tokens, one for staking/dividend, and one for utility. There is a VERY interesting one, one of our advisors work on.
http://wetonomy.com/ and the concept of debt token is very promising to me. An interesting mix could be : you could sell an utility token (to pay fees); for each utility token bought, you send as well 7, 10 or 20 times more "debt token". You buy back debt token with your profit so contributors receive somehow a dividend until they run out of token, and they still have a utility token.