For months, the cryptocurrency community has hotly debated whether the initial coin offering (ICO) market is in a bubble and if so, when the ICO bubble will pop.
The ICO Bubble Debate
We discussed it when ICOs began to drive up ethereum transaction fees, and one investor paid $2,200 to participate in the Brave ICO.
We debated it when developers began to raise millions despite not having a workable product. It resurfaced when the Bancor ICO surpassed $150 million, when EOS raised $185 million when Tezos raised $232 million, and again when Filecoin raised $250 million–solely from accredited investors.
We debated it when ICOs raised $600 million in a 30-day period, and year-to-date funding began to approach $2 billion. We discussed it some more when bankers began to abandon lucrative careers to chase the ICO markets.
We continued to debate it when rapper The Game promoted Paragon’s “cannabis revolution” and superstar athletes Floyd Mayweather and Luis Suarez pumped the Stox prediction market, and once more when the legendary boxer told his Twitter followers to call him “Floyd Crypto Mayweather.”
In the end, all it took was a single tweet to provide the definitive answer.
The Tweet That Ended the ICO Bubble Debate
That tweet came from Paris Hilton, the heiress and reality television star who once famously asked:
In the tweet, Hilton said she was “looking forward to participating” in Gravity4’s Lydian token ICO. According to the company, users will be able to trade Lydian tokens for the company’s data-driven digital marketing services.
Yes, you read that correctly. Hot off the release of her new fragrance line at Perfumania, Hilton is taking the logical next step: an investment in an ERC20 token created by a company that bills itself as “The World’s First A.I. Big Data Marketing Cloud.”
The next morning, the People’s Bank of China took the extraordinary step to ban ICOs within the nation. Was Hilton’s tweet the straw that broke the regulatory agency’s back? Probably not–but is it any less likely than Hilton participating in the ICO in the first place?
Responding to the China ICO ban, Hilton tweeted a link to an article called “The Paris Coin Got It Right,” in which the author lauded her for choosing a token that was “not a security” according to his or her interpretation of securities law.
Folks, if you’re looking for a sign that the ICO markets are in a bubble, this is it.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
