There are a ton of ways to find and secure proper, reliable stakeholders who are committed to your technology or your cause/product. (Private ICO being one of the ways. Keep things under wrap, develop the technology, have a proof of concept, sell some product, and then MAYBE if it makes sense, go public.) A public ICO blasting across the internet when there is no product, no plan, and no real engineering already done is nothing but a cash grab, and I am not at all surprised that they are embroiled in lawsuits.
Is this really a property of ICOs? the behavior you describe may be very common nowadays, but from what I understand there is nothing intrinsic in this kind of funding model to be necessarily like that. Maybe after a crash the market will get a bit more mature and start using public ICOs for real stuff, and I think that could evolve into something really interesting :)
This case sounds like #3 - where they have an idea, but immature company structure, poor legal structure, and no governance that is supposed to bind a team together - in this case they are fighting about the money ...
As always - in the end it's all people. Public ICO is a tool, and it's really NOT the tool to use if you want to find a real base of support and well-intentioned stakeholders (who won't turn around and sue you the moment the ico completes :)
One hostile contributor doesn't tell you anything about the intentions of the rest.
You can say Ethereum, but it wasn't an ICO properly speaking. Even if it was, a single good example in hundreds isn't enough.
Ripple didn't have an ICO, Bitcoin Cash didn't, Zcash didn't, Monero didn't, Stellar didn't.
The incentives for token sales are to raise as much Eth as you can, spend as little of it as possible on the actual project while watching its value appreciate, then either have a product launch that semi-fails or have some good excuse why the project just couldn't work for some reason while minimizing the chance that people bring legal action against the project.
Arguably that was the model for all other ICOs and the platform for the vast majority.
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal...
Basic Attention Tokens are already integrated in Brave browser: https://basicattentiontoken.org/
And Ethereum did a crowdsale. On Counterparty and Ommi. Itβs literally in the first paragraph of their Wikipedia article:
>> Ethereum was proposed in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher and programmer. Development was funded by an online crowdsale between July and August 2014.[5] The system went live on 30 July 2015, with 11.9 million coins "premined" for the crowdsale.[6] This accounts for approximately 13 percent of the total circulating supply
Personally I would do it quietly, with good legal backing, and as a single entity or with a small group of investors rather than a large class action - and reach an early settlement to get our own investment back without causing too much of a stir for other investors.
"Futures" because they are just a pile of tokens bought by the exchange, and you can't sell your own tokens before release, so no way to get them into the exchange and no functioning market.
They raised some money - they now want to extract that money. Obviously, they can't for some reason, either being blocked by investors or other members of their company who are disputing it (or want the money for themselves too).
It's super transparent, and in the end, people are people. An ICO or blockchain, or any technology isn't going to change that fact.
However, certain ICOs are actually bringing products to market that would never otherwise exist. Some of them are trying to fundamentally change how some industries operate. Others are fundamentally improving blockchain technology. But in order for their products to operate they need enough stakeholders to make them viable. And this is where ICOs come in. There were many of us who believed that Tezos was one of those ICOs. Their product could still be greatly useful if executed correctly. Given that they have raised more money then they could ever have hoped for, it is incredible that they are being silly enough to embark on a public dispute between themselves and get involved in lawsuits with their investors. Just getting back to work and executing their initial vision (which they can do many times over with that amount of funds) seems like an obvious thing to do. They would lose a lot more money (or worse) by continuing on this trajectory. It is incredible how short-term greedy they seem from the outside.
Or maybe I am missing some information that would explain this stupidity. I would love to know more.