The Ethereal Summit, currently taking place in Tel Aviv, Israel has got several prominent figures speaking at the event. One of which is the co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin. Dubbed as a ‘Q&A On Ethereum 2.0 With Vitalik,’ the topic of discussion went onto many things in regards to the networks future and scalability solutions. Some of the hottest trends were talked about too including Decentralized Finance (DeFi) but one specific subject Buterin touched on was that which has received much criticism over the past few years, and that is ICO’s (Initial Coin Offerings). Back in 2017, ICO’s were a big topic and throughout most of last year, this applied still. As it turned out though, many of the projects couldn’t deliver on the projects and the product they wished to deploy. Given that all the money had been raised for these project but nothing came as a result, they have been classed as ‘scams’. Most of them anyway. “This is a spin on the ICO idea that I had one and a half years ago. So the idea is, instead of projects having ICOs where people will just send them the money, and they, well, go away, you have a scheme where people put their tokens into a smart contract. […] The developers don’t just have access to the tokens, they can’t take them. Instead what happens is the money gets put in compound, or some other interesting thing […] and then the interest goes to the developers.” In terms of decentralised finance, Buterin said: “I’m very excited about what DeFi offers in principle. The idea that anyone, anywhere in the world can just have access to a system that lets them pay each other […] and basically lets them choose their own financial exposure is very powerful to me. That’s something that a lot of people just don’t have access to.” Even so, the co-founder warns that people shouldn’t put money into a project if they are pressured into doing so or if it is an untested model.