Those that were around in 2017 likely remember the initial coin offering (ICO) craze, which saw swathes of new projects emerge — many of which generated staggering returns for participants in a matter of weeks or months.
Although many ICO-funded projects turned out to be duds, a small proportion grew and evolved to become the current heavyweight blockchain platforms, including Ether (ETH), Filecoin (FIL), Polkadot (DOT) and Cardano (ADA) — each of which are among the top 30 largest crypto assets by market capitalization.
The average ICO generated a whopping 1,320% profit for short-term investors, making them among the most attractive investment opportunities in recent years — despite their less than stellar long-term performance on the whole.
But there was a major problem. Not only was it incredibly difficult to accurately gauge the strength of a project due to the sheer number of ICOs and simultaneous euphoria in the market, but securing a slot in top tier ICOs was next to impossible for regular users — often requiring pure luck, connections or a sizeable investment to secure a slot.
The start of changes
This began to change in 2019 with the advent of the Binance Launchpad, which for the first time, provided a route that opened early-stage projects to the masses, or more specifically, anybody who held Binance’s native utility token (BNB).
Though Binance Launchpad arguably kickstarted the democratic cryptocurrency crowdfunding space, it has gradually become less and less accessible. Now, users need to hold exorbitantly large sums of BNB to secure a reasonable size allocation from its initial DEX offerings (IDOs) — making it anything but fair access.
But the last year has seen the advent of a huge number of alternative platforms, all with a single goal in mind: To democratize access to the next generation of crypto projects and protocols. Known simply as launchpads, these platforms feature a hand-selected and curated list of new projects that are…
