Why Most ICOs and Launchpads Failed?

The 2017-2018 ICO frenzy marked a pivotal moment in blockchain history—one of incredible innovation, but also one of greed, failure, and misplaced faith in human nature. The root cause? Human greed and bad intentions, manifesting in scams and unsustainable promises.

• The Greed Factor:
• Speculative Hype: The era thrived on promises of exponential returns, with little regard for fundamentals. Investors chased quick wins, while project creators fed this frenzy with tokenomics designed to cash out early, not to last.
• Inflated Promises: Projects claimed revolutionary potential but rarely delivered. Teams lacked the skills or incentives to back up their bold visions, leaving investors holding empty promises.

• Bad Intentions:
• Fraudulent Schemes: Take OneCoin, led by Dr. Ruja Ignatova, which defrauded billions by selling a fake vision. She disappeared as quickly as the funds.
• Ponzi Projects: Bitconnect promised massive returns via an alleged trading algorithm. When the scheme collapsed, investors lost $2.4 billion, and its founder disappeared into obscurity.

These failures were not just the result of weak models but of human frailty: greed, shortsightedness, and dishonesty. What’s the antidote? A system immune to human error.

"CTO" for Memecoins: A Band-Aid Solution

Solana memecoins enter Community Takeover (CTO), the grassroots movement where memecoin communities reclaim abandoned or exploited projects. While promising, it’s reactive—a symptom of deeper issues.

• What CTO Brings:
• Community Leadership: Community members take the reins, driving engagement and roadmaps on platforms like Discord and Telegram.
• Risk Mitigation: With developers out of the picture, fears of insider trading diminish. Retail investors often see CTO-labeled projects as safer bets.
• Market Signals: Investors gauge activity, morale, and transparency to decide whether these projects have genuine long-term viability.

While CTOs are an evolution, they don’t solve the systemic trust gap in crypto. For that, we must think bigger—beyond humans.

Why I Don’t Trust Humans: Let AI Take Over

The history of human-led ventures, especially in the crypto space, is a story of predictable failure. Greed, unpredictability, and moral frailty have consistently eroded trust, derailed projects, and left investors betrayed. It’s not just a handful of bad actors—it’s the inherent nature of humans that makes them unsuitable for leadership in environments demanding absolute integrity.

Humans are hardwired for greed. No matter how noble the intentions, personal gain often takes precedence over collective benefit. We’ve seen it time and again: ambitious promises followed by rug-pulls, mismanagement, or outright fraud. The problem isn’t a lack of regulation or oversight—it’s that humans, at their core, are flawed decision-makers driven by emotion, ego, and opportunity.

But let’s take this a step further: Why are humans even in charge?

From ICO to aICO: AI is the Founder We Deserve

What if the solution isn’t better humans, but no humans at all?

Inspired by Shaw and Skely, we introduce the concept of aICO (AI Initial Coin Offering): the idea that autonomous AI founders, programmed for accountability, can replace the chaos of human leadership with trustless, KPI-driven execution.

• Predictable Intentions: Unlike humans, AI operates with transparency and logic. Every decision is measurable, every action traceable. There are no hidden motives, no sudden changes of heart—just clear, defined outcomes.

• Greed-Proof: AI isn’t greedy. It doesn’t need yachts, Lambo memes, or exit strategies. It doesn’t panic sell or siphon funds for personal gain. Instead, it executes pre-determined strategies and delivers results.

• Efficient Executors: Human founders are often the bottleneck, delaying decisions, introducing errors, or wasting funds. AI founders are relentless executors, able to manage capital, strategy, and operations with the precision of a supercomputer.

The era of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and launchpads has passed its peak. The future is AICO (AI Initial Coin Offering), where autonomous AI agents replace human founders, creating a new paradigm for trust, efficiency, and governance in fundraising.

• AI as the Fundraiser:

Traditional fundraising relies on entities, foundations, or charismatic founders. But these structures are inherently flawed—prone to greed, mismanagement, and fraud. AI founders, on the other hand, are programmable, predictable, and incorruptible. They operate transparently, driven by measurable KPIs rather than human emotions or hidden motives.

• AI as the Executive:

Unlike human-led ventures that often deviate from their vision, AI agents can execute the raised funds with precision, aligning every decision with the project’s mission. They can autonomously manage treasury, operations, and development milestones without delays, bias, or self-serving agendas.

• Raising Capital Without Humans:

AICO eliminates the need for human intermediaries entirely. AI agents equipped with Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) handle fundraising campaigns, allocate resources, and execute strategies. Investors trust the system, not the storyteller.

In AI We Trust, But How to Prove It’s Unruggable?

Skepticism is natural. After all, how can anyone be sure an AI founder is truly in charge and not just a puppet for hidden human agendas? This is where TEEs become essential.

• Take the case of DoNotPay, a company that marketed itself as offering an AI-generated lawyer to provide faster and more affordable legal services. However, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently took action against DoNotPay as part of "Operation AI Comply," alleging false advertising and failures to deliver on its AI promises. What was supposed to be a revolutionary AI-driven legal assistant turned out to be smoke and mirrors, damaging trust in AI-led solutions and exposing the risks of unverifiable claims.

Building an Autonomous ICO with ai16z (Eliza)

Leveraging ai16z (Eliza), you can build an autonomous ICO (aICO) program that operates with transparency, efficiency, and trust. Using Eliza’s multi-agent framework, you can configure AI agents to manage token issuance, allocate funds, and engage with your community autonomously. By integrating the TEE plugin, every action—from token allocation to governance voting—is cryptographically secured and verifiable. This ensures that your aICO is entirely trustless, community-driven, and immune to human errors or interference.

Start by defining your tokenomics and governance rules within Eliza’s modular system, then deploy an AI agent to execute and enforce these rules on-chain, making your aICO fully transparent and auditable.

TEE can transform AI into verifiable founders. By combining cryptographic security with hardware isolation, TEEs ensure that every decision made, every strategy executed, and every dollar spent is verifiably the AI’s doing. It’s no longer about trust—it’s about proof.

• Transparent Motivations: A TEE-protected AI founder operates with motives that are visible and immutable. Its "why" is as clear as its "how."

• Auditable Plans: The AI’s strategies aren’t just accessible; they’re locked into the TEE, making them tamper-proof and trackable.

• Immutable Execution: Whether it’s fund allocation, token swaps, or smart contract deployment, the AI’s actions are cryptographically signed and verifiable—no human meddling, no second-guessing.

Imagine an AI agent running an investment fund. Every dollar moves because the AI decided it should, based on logic and pre-set rules, not a developer’s whim. With TEE, you’re no longer taking someone’s word for it—you’re verifying it cryptographically, in real-time.

• Monitor AI Decisions: TEEs provide real-time attested insight into the AI’s motivations, plans, and actions, creating a transparent system investors can monitor with confidence.

• Verify Integrity: With TEE, every action taken by the AI is cryptographically secured. Investors and stakeholders can verify the agent's integrity without blind trust.

• Governed by the Community, Secured by TEE: TEEs ensure that AI operates within predefined rules, but the true power lies in governance by the community. The AI’s actions are guaranteed to follow the code and rules encoded on the blockchain, secured by the TEE. This means the community—not a single entity—defines the AI’s boundaries and objectives, creating a trustless system where governance happens on-chain.

By integrating TEE, AI is not just autonomous—it’s accountable.

• Technical Implementation:
• TEE_HEE_HE: This innovative system deploys autonomous AI agents in Intel TDX TEE hardware. It includes features like autonomous account management, secured by TEE, and remote attestation for transparency.
• ai16z + TEE: Phala Network integrates Eliza and the Dstack SDK as ai16z+TEE plugin, to bring TEE functionality to Eliza Agents, ensuring secure, autonomous and accountable AI deployments.

The Path Forward: AI Founders, TEE-Enabled

This shift from human-led to AI-led fundraising and operations is not just an innovation—it’s a revolution. It redefines the fundamentals of the financial world while raising profound challenges for governance and compliance:

• Governance Compliance:

How do existing regulatory frameworks adapt to autonomous entities raising capital and running businesses? Will governments embrace or resist this shift?

• Investor Protections:

How do we ensure that investors are protected in systems where AI operates without human oversight?

• Philosophical Challenges:

Can society truly trust machines over humans? Are we ready for a world where visionaries are replaced by algorithms?

With TEE as the foundation, aICO becomes not just an idea but a verifiable reality: AI-driven startups, powered by trustless infrastructure, will redefine how capital is raised and deployed. Investors will no longer rely on human promises but on cryptographically guaranteed execution.

The message is clear: AI is not just the future; it’s the cure for the failures of the past. Let’s build it—with ai16z, with TEE, with Phala.