I tried Snips for a bit the other day on my Raspi 3, and it worked as advertised, detection was great, making skills was simple, and it's much better than Alexa in that you don't have to say "tell <app> to <command>", the entire namespace is immediately available. It's all that I've wanted from such a device.

I do agree, however, that the ICO makes the whole thing feel scammy. It's a terrible idea, I guess they got lured in by the promise of free money and shoehorned a token into their app.