raghav Profile picture
ceo @coinlist. prev protocol dev, math, consumer social, startups.
Jan 2 4 tweets 3 min read
I just sent this to a founder who asked if they should do an ICO on CoinList or raise with Echo: 

TLDR: Syndicate platforms like Echo are for young projects that want to add a few $100K to an angel or VC round—it’s not a retail crowdsale and tokens may not be distributed for years after the sale (if ever). ICOs are for projects that want to launch a token, raise $5M-$10M, and add 10K-100K new community members.

Capital: Even in the 2024 bear market, ICOs on CoinList raised 20x more capital than Echo: $7.5M raised on average on CoinList vs. $380K raised on Echo.

Community: The average ICO on CoinList got 10K new community members in 2024, with an all-time record of 1.8m participants. The average deal on Echo has 151 investors because it’s only available to rich investors by law (typically multi-millionaires).

Tokens: ICOs create community because investors hold and use tokens. In syndicates, investors hold paperwork. They may get their tokens years later, when the syndicate manager (not the investors) decides to distribute them. It’s not even “not your keys, not your coins,” because there are no coins.

This is not a criticism of syndicates or Echo—it’s just a different use case than an ICO. Syndicates are a great addition to a traditional VC round for young projects; ICOs are a true crowdsale for projects that want an alternative to airdrops.

We actually did a syndicate for Filecoin in 2017. But we decided to focus on ICOs because the old-school VC model concentrates ownership and profit in the hands of a few rich people. It’s not a crowdsale and it’s not crypto IMO. 

But the VC round isn’t going away so we’re looking into what we can do to help projects with their early round in a crypto-native way… There are a couple other differences I didn’t mention:

Regs: Over 1M people on CoinList have invested ~$1B in ICOs over 7 years. We spend a fortune on compliance. The regulatory burden for syndicates is also large and can last up to a decade, so scrutinize your provider. FYI, a company offering these syndicates, Assure, went out of business in 2022, leaving all of their investors high-and-dry.

Fees: In syndicates, projects don’t pay a fee but the investors can pay as much as 20% of the profit (plus administrative fees) to the person who leads the investment. Projects on CoinList pay a small % of funds raised when they ICO on CoinList. In return, they’re able to raise $5M-$10M and add 10K-100K new community members. Investors pay nothing.
Nov 19, 2022 9 tweets 3 min read
1/ A great thread.

Note, it's not because we're (@CoinList) not trying to be inclusive. Contrary, a few things at play: 2/ @CoinList spends an inordinate amount of time and energy working with Builders on token distribution, tokenomics, compliance, etc.

A lot of what we do for Community Sales isn't scalable.