 I want to talk about ICOs, you know, it was it's a big part of the theorem ecosystem now. That was not planned, you know, it was not planned to be that like such an important thing in Ethereum. It was more about the decentralized future and ICO became a very big part at least in the last year. For the ones who don't know me, I built a few things which were relevant in the space and did a few things which, you know, kind of a cost that thing by accident, especially the ICO. That's why I feel obligated now to, you know, come up with something better to improve on what we had, what we have. So we think about how tokens work, right? Tokens are a simple smart contract with an account balance in it and you simply ask the smart contract, like, what is my balance and you can send a request to transfer your balance and he will do that if you are, if you have to, if you're allowed, you know, if it comes from the right origin. So this is how tokens work, which is also for many people outside of the Ethereum ecosystem a mystery, by the way, you know, like things are very mixed up here with terminologies and what is a cryptocurrency, what is a token and how do things work? So yeah, the basic with tokens in Ethereum, ESC 20 tokens, they are a smart contract and they have an internal account balance list. The great thing with this is and that really what led to the ICO boom is that this smart contract can talk to other smart contracts or another smart contract can talk to this token smart contract. And really this is on the end what made ICOs a thing, really, because we had an automated way of how we can receive funds and allocate ownership in the same process and that could be as simple as one transaction and that really what led people to make ICOs and in 2017 a lot of projects who are not necessarily anymore decentralized, let's say, for better or for worse, but it also made a lot of people think now about token economics, you know, we have now academia, token engineering, we have a new field of research and all of those things. And we also have a complete, you know, business world of ICO full service agencies and all of these things. So a lot of things came out of that simple two step process ICO smart contract plus token smart contract. So the problem with the ICOs is that, you know, a lot of people collected a lot of money and they were very happy after they collected the money and after they thought, okay, what exactly are the economy? What is the economic behind my ICO? What is the token? And the problem also it led to that people got a lot of money and it might change the mind of the purpose of the project or even the purpose in life, right? Lambo is rather than doing something useful. And that's the problem. So it created this imbalance between investors, especially in 2017 where everybody kind of rushed in any random ICO. It created this imbalance of investors giving money, just hoping to get on the next big train. And the project is then funded and really like, you know, pivots a lot during the way and like sometimes maybe it's nowhere. So how can we make this better? How can we make this more fair? You know, how can we build this in such a way that actually these things can't happen or are less likely to happen? Vitalik had actually an interesting proposal of the Dicol where he combined a Dow, you know, a voting system of people with an ICO and that's a very interesting idea. And when I saw that sounded interesting and especially has this interesting thing of like flowing funds over time and you can increase the tab based on the vote and you can stop the flow also based on the vote. And that was great. That was a great idea. I actually came up at the same time, similar with my concept too, before I really looked in detail in this and it's very similar idea. The problem with this is that people don't vote as we have seen in the Dow and as we have seen with other things, you know, like people don't read either, you know, they also don't vote. Even if you give them a lot of good interfaces, still, you know, this hurdle of, you know, like doing the action and if it's not really super important, then you get probably like your 10% of voters. So how can we make this better? And I had this idea in my head of how can this be improved over time and so on. And I came up with the RICO concept, which I later found out is the Racketeer and Criminal Organizations Act. But, you know, the whole world is not America, so that's fine, I guess. But, you know, I think it's great because RICO is short. RICO means tasty in Spanish and reversible, you know, you just add something in front of the ICO. So the RICO concept is basically exactly in the basic, the same thing that funds flow over time rather than based on milestones and on any kind of voting inside the community funds flow over time. And the most important thing is everybody can choose at any point in time if he doesn't believe in the project anymore. And I think this is really the most crucial part of that concept and why I think it will succeed is because the power lies within everybody themselves without that they have to agree with, you know, their peers or a bunch of strangers if like this is a good idea now or not. Because agreement, you know, that's like almost the most difficult thing most of the time in a very loose community. So in this idea, everybody can really just stop his committed funds from flowing through the project. This could be, you know, like that the project turned out not to be as good as you thought, or you actually sent your funds and then you started scrolling down the website and realized, oh, that is a very different thing than what I thought, you know, especially in the formal times, we kind of had that situation probably a lot of. So you always are in control of if you really support the project and this makes on the end, the people really believe in the project stay in the project and everybody else, you know, can leave early and somebody else can come in and if you still believe in the project. So this principle is like based in three phases. That can be actually only one phase really, but I put it in three phases or in two phases, mainly in different stages. So there's the allocation phase. The allocation phase is basically when people give funds to the project or that basically they're not giving it to the project, yet they're committing funds to the project. And this point in time, you know, let's say it's 20 days, basically you can commit your funds, but you can always send back your tokens and reverse your commitment, but you can always go out with like zero risk, except your gas cost, right, risk. And probably you had to fill out some KYC and upload some documents, which you hopefully solve with identity and automation too. So we are back to the one transaction participation. So there's the allocation phase, people participate by sending or committing funds, locking them in a smart contract. And then there's the distribution phase. And this is the phase where the funds flow over time to the actual project, which, you know, that did the ICO. And the good thing here is there's time, you know, and time solves most of time a lot of things and it gets more clarity along the way. And it's a rather straightforward thing because you know how long time, you know, how long it's like, for example, two years, you can really count with that. As we nicely can also count with the Bitcoin issuance, you know, we can count the time flows in the same manner. So inside the distribution phase, and this is the interesting part, you're able to reverse or your funding, your commitment. So basically you're able to withdraw the funds you committed at any point in time. And you do this by simply sending back your tokens. And this can be as simple as done with any wallet where I sent my funds from. I can simply send my tokens, whatever I got back, and I'm like, you know, stop committing the project. The smart contract then has to calculate of how much time already passed, how much of the funds already are allocated to the project itself and are withdrawable by the project, and how much of the funds you should get back, and how much of the tokens you should keep. Because obviously, if you waited in a period of two years, you waited one year, then at least you should keep half of your tokens because you get only half of your funds back. And at some point, either these are the native tokens of the project, which have some kind of functionality in a smart contract system. Maybe there are, you know, security tokens in the future, which is like the big talk now, or they are swappable to the actual project, which is about to launch in the future. We have seen many times that people do a blockchain and, you know, you basically want to allocate like who has committed how much. It's kind of like an advanced Excel sheet, you know, an Excel sheet where nobody, even not the project owner can manipulate on it. So if you look at it from the outside perspective, it's really just simple like an allocation phase, a distribution phase, and inside the distribution phase, there's a possibility of withdrawal, and there's also the possibility of other people buying in. So let's say you have a million tokens reserved for the process, and only half get bought, or let's say all get bought, and then like half of those get returned during like one year or so, then they're again for sale and somebody else could buy them up. What probably will happen is that during the almost at the end of the time, people will all fomo in, you know, buy whatever is left there, and the project gets a big chunk of money in the last like a minute or so. That's something we have to see, obviously. And how I approach this here is that this is a model based on one token. So this token is purely your access and your accounting mechanism to see how much you have committed. And you could technically transfer that commitment, or you could split that commitment, and you could like send any kind of part back of whatever your tokens are, and then keep only the part which you sent back and which is partial to that, which is not refundable. And there's two ways of how you can solve that. Either you create two tokens where you say, one is refundable. No. And once you swap, you refund that, you get a part of the tokens of unrefundable tokens back, or you can do this, that you actually lock a part of your account balance inside the same token. And the advantage of this is that you have only one token, which if it's not refundable, it's actually also not transferable. So you would never end up on an exchange if it would be transferable. And it works actually technically with every existing wallet. The only problem is that these will not tell you what is your locked and what is your unlocked balance. And that's something you could probably look up then on another website and so on. So the idea here is that if some people refunded or other people didn't refund, then some people have a part of the balance locked, another part of the balance which they can move. And obviously, if you try to transfer your locked balance, it would just throw. If not, you can just transfer your lock balance, your normal balance. So there's just two ways you can do it, either through two tokens, which can be confusing for certain projects, or you can do it through a locked balance. The locked balance obviously only works if this token is swappable at some point, then it's only transferable in the case of if there's a swap event happening. Until that, you just keep it. Or you never refund and you keep yourself the option open, and then you could technically transfer them around. So if you look at this in total, it kind of looks like a Tesla semi-truck. And so most of the project probably will get a base funding. You know, they do a private sale, which is not in that process. And the reason for that is that you have some sort of security and you're not completely reliant on a fluctuating part of money based on the FOMO and the fart in the crypto space. At the same time, you have this allocation phase where there's like zero risk, because in this moment you can always get out and then there is the dispersion process. And that's, for example, is something which can happen over two years' time. So that's a long enough time, which probably makes scams very unlikely because if you want to scam in two years, at least it takes a lot of time and you might have have built it on the end what you promised. So that's even reversing then scams into building things. In other words, it also allows projects which might fail due to whatever reasons that they fail naturally without everybody like being left with nothing. So that's kind of like the whole picture of how this can work and obviously that's a very simple, this is a very simple, simplificated version. You can make all kind of iterations and all kind of alterations of how that could look like. And if you look into current VC investing and it's rather very similar, the difference here is it's automated. And it also has the ownership automated. And the good thing is that everybody can choose on its own and he doesn't have to ask anybody and he doesn't have to do anything besides taking out his wallet and sending his tokens back the moment when he stops believing. That's the whole project. This is the whole idea which I would like to see be adopted in this space and what better process than doing this as my own with my own project. So I'm working right now on a fashion lifestyle blockchain and basically industry specific blockchain. And we want to use exactly that model, which is we have to obviously get the allowance from the regulators if this is okay. But I think the benefit here is that we are able to auto-regulate on chain and build a system which is safe by design where people can actually participate in something with less risk than they have today rather than creating prospectors and terms and agreements and stuff which everybody just clicks away and doesn't read anyway and doesn't really give any kind of investor security for real, right? If people just invest in bad things, then they just invest in bad things. This gives you an option to always choose again if there was a good idea or not. And I'm pretty confident that this will work out and when we see this work out once, I'm pretty confident also that other project will adopt that process. If others adopt it then we are moving towards a self regulation in our space, I think which is extremely important that we show things can be done in a better way and actually it brings more safety than creating huge regulation frameworks and even more lawyer costs and even more slow processes because the whole point with the blockchain and why ICOS are so successful is because it is easy. That's really the main point. That's all I have today for you. So you mentioned you worked on ERC 20. So is this another standard you're working? So what if we want to use this now? Maybe if there's a standard that might help. Yeah, so basically the idea is that I haven't proposed it as a standard yet. We will obviously in the process of when we make our ICO or our recall, we will like build the smart contracts out, test it out over the course, like show the specifications we use and once we know that it really works and all the math works well, then maybe I propose it as a standard. I mean, I propose ERC 20 and other standards. Standards process are pretty slow and that they take time and so on. I think like a good example is to show that it works and then we can discuss about standardizing things. I mean, yeah, the concept is rather simple. In our technical white paper I am also explaining the exact specification, how you do it, but you know it's not a really complicated idea so everybody can probably just get cracking and building it himself, so. Do you think that it might danger the life of the project because of like people getting feared and just like taking it out because the price goes down or whatever? So like it will be very difficult for a project to kinda, if it will be milestone based maybe, but if it's just like a time based? So I probably, it's not, obviously there can be many iterations on that concept, right? There can be milestone based, but then you have the tricky problem of voting or who or Oracle or whoever decides whatever milestone was reached or not. I think the idea here is obviously if there's a private set in front that gives you base funding, which gives you some kind of like basis that you are not completely like without nothing. At the same time, if you are a good project, I mean, you know, we have already brought you in a space who basically took the risk of keeping the ethers that for some work really well, for some I didn't, obviously, based on the time when they did it. I think we will see also fluctuation. Actually, my gut feeling is that probably the pot would be around two-third fluctuating. Maybe there's a thought moment where everything goes down, but then it can also bounce up again. There is a risk, but I mean, entrepreneurship is always a risk in general, so. And it brings this balance back between the community and the project. I think this is very important and you can probably even have like a soft cap of whatever can be, I mean, maybe like 20% of whatever you give is immediately not refundable. I mean, could be any kind of alterations based on what security the projects want or need. And it's also based on the size of the project. For example, if you start a whole ecosystem like a blockchain, you know, most of the time, these projects collect a lot of money because they can't be very large. You know, it can grow to a huge ecosystem at some point. If it's just, obviously, you know, I want to build this app and I want to collect here a million and then on the end it would be worth like 10 at some point. It's a more risky model, obviously, right? Thanks, I think that's all the time we have. Thank you Fabian. Please join me in thanking Fabian one more time.