Ask HN: Are any of you exploiting the ICO hype?

So what you're asking is are we looking for greater fools?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

Forget taxi drivers telling you to invest as a mark of a bubble, questions like this are about as clear as signal as you can get.

We found out that ambisafe, tokenmarket and the like receive a huge amount of requests for handling ICOs, but they also charge a vast amount of money.

So, we started working on our own smartcontract and ICO platform. You can give it a try already at https://crowdsale.express/ but it's working on the testnet. We will activate livenet soon and are eager to hear your feedback.

It seems like if you're fast and have good marketing, it's a great way to make some money.

I'm kind of surprised it's not getting regulated as a security.

Right now ICO combines the legitimacy of seeming like an IPO with the security of code written by strangers on the internet, the virality of Twitter rants, the promises of a budget spent producing concept videos, and the value of snake oil.

Almost none of these ICOs are founded on a concrete product that exists. That's a shame because there is the germ of a good idea here, but it's mostly being exploited by opportunism.

Some will walk away with fortunes, but it won't be the people buying.

And even though I lean pretty far to the libertarian side, I think this space needs some serious regulation to protect people from themselves.

But you can still sell the shovels for the ICO gold rush.