Not many ICOs led to efficient product development, but most of them were also not scams. Most teams that ICOed had a profile similar to early stage tech startups. The outcome was usually what you’d expect if you gave a bunch of inexperienced seed stage companies series B-sized piles of cash. They didn’t have the urgency developed by running on a shoestring in an earlier stage of the company and they didn’t have the direction of having actual users, so they generally have been puttering along and taking their sweet time on the tech.

That being said, most ICOs were not put together by scammers, and many of them have made an honest effort to produced technically advance systems that are often not useful in the real world.

The fact that this author needs to insist that every single ICO was totally fake and has stock photography portraits of fake developers shows that he has an axe to grind and casts doubt on the article.