The ICO Collapse Taught Projects How to Avoid Reprisals, MEW Founder Says

The boom of the initial coin offerings defined the blockchain industry in 2017 and the first half of 2018 as capital flowed to finance many new projects and the associated services.

Ahead of Ethereum's five year anniversary, Cointelegraph interviewed Kosala Hemachandra, the founder of MyEtherWallet.

MyEtherWallet was at the time among the most popular and user-friendly wallets, and it had complete support for ERC-20 tokens - vital for engaging with ICOs.

MyEtherWallet's transition to a "Trusted brand" began in tandem with ICOs, Hemachandra said.

"It was definitely 2017. I can't think of any specific point in time, but the ICO craze was the starting point for the change."

"As soon as the SEC started to get involved, that's when I knew that these ICOs might not survive, [or] they might not continue to survive."

According to him, that scrutiny was invaluable for later projects.

With that knowledge, new projects can design their tokens in a way to "Overcome those hurdles" as government entities will "Leave them alone."

"It was a good lesson for some of these DeFi projects, because if that didn't happen, some of these different projects might be in trouble right now because the SEC might be going after them as well," Hemachandra said.

"It's crazy how we are trying to create a decentralized system that is still limited by centralized authorities that are putting pressure on everything that we do."