From ICO to aICO, a financing revolution that reshapes the financial world

Original title: aICO – A Path to Unruggable Money

Original author: marvin_tong, co-founder of Phala Network

Оригинальный перевод: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor’s note: This article discusses replacing human founders with AI, securing AI’s autonomous decision-making through a trusted execution environment (TEE), and launching an aICO (AI-led initial coin offering) to address trust issues and inefficiencies in traditional financing.

Ниже приводится исходное содержание (для удобства чтения и понимания исходное содержание было реорганизовано):

Why do most ICOs and Launchpads fail?

The ICO craze of 2017-2018 was an important moment in the history of blockchain – full of innovation, but also full of greed, failure, and misplaced trust in human nature. The root cause is: human greed and malice, leading to scams and unsustainable promises.

Driven by greed

Speculative mania: The era was filled with promises of exponential returns, but little attention was paid to project fundamentals. Investors chased quick profits, and project owners fueled the trend by designing token economic models that were born for cashing out, completely ignoring long-term development.

Overpromising: Many projects claim to have disruptive potential, but few actually deliver. Teams lack the ability or motivation to realize their grand visions, leaving investors empty-handed.

Malicious behavior

Fraudulent Scams: Take OneCoin, for example, where its leader, Ruja Ignatova, defrauded billions of dollars through false promises and then absconded with the money.
Ponzi scheme: Bitconnect promised huge returns through a so-called trading algorithm. However, when the scam collapsed, investors lost $2.4 billion and the founder disappeared.

These failures are not just a result of weak models, but rather a reflection of human weakness: greed, short-sightedness, and dishonesty. So what’s the solution? A system that avoids human error.

「CTO」temporary fix for Memecoin

Memecoin on Solana entered into “Community Takeover (CTO)” mode, a grassroots movement for the community to take over abandoned or abused projects. While promising, this is a reactive response that does nothing to address the deeper issues.

The Role of a CTO

Community leadership: Community members take over the project and drive project participation and planning on platforms like Discord and Telegram.
Risk Mitigation: After developers exit, the risk of insider trading is reduced, and retail investors tend to view these projects as safer.
Рынок Signals: Investors look at community activity, morale, and transparency to determine if projects have long-term potential.

While CTO is an evolution, it does not solve the systemic trust deficit in криптовалюта. To truly solve this problem, we need to go beyond human limitations.

Why I don’t trust humans: Let AI take over

The history of human-led projects, especially in crypto, is full of predictable failures. Greed, uncertainty, and moral weakness have repeatedly undermined trust, causing projects to go off track and leaving investors feeling betrayed. This is not just a problem of a few bad guys, but human nature makes them unable to lead in an environment that requires absolute integrity. Therefore, trusting AI may be the solution.

Humans are naturally greedy: AI is the solution

No matter how noble the intentions, individual interests often take precedence over the collective good. This has been demonstrated countless times: ambitious promises ultimately end in failure, mismanagement, or outright fraud. The problem is not the lack of regulation or oversight, but the fundamental flaws of human beings as decision makers driven by emotion, vanity, and opportunity.

So why do we still allow humans to be in power?

From ICO to aICO: AI is the founder we deserve

What if the solution is not better humans, but no humans at all? Inspired by shawmakesmagic and 123skely, we propose the concept of aICO (AI Initial Токен Offering): by introducing autonomous AI founders, replacing the chaos of human leadership with supervised logic.

Why choose AI Founder?

Predictable Intentions

Unlike humans, AI operates on the basis of transparency and logic. Every decision can be measured and every action can be tracked. There are no hidden motives or emotional sudden regrets, only clear and defined outcomes.

Anti-greedy mechanism

AI is not greedy. It does not need luxury cars, yachts, or an exit plan. AI does not panic sell or embezzle funds to enrich itself. It simply executes the pre-set strategy and delivers results.

Efficient executor

Human founders are often the bottleneck of projects, delaying decisions, introducing errors or wasting money. AI founders are ruthless execution machines that can manage capital, strategy and operations as accurately as supercomputers.

aICOs goal is to fill the trust gap with AI and provide an efficient, transparent and sustainable future for the crypto space.

ICO is a thing of the past, AICO is the future

The craze of ICOs and Launchpads has faded, and the future belongs to AICOs (AI Initial Coin Offerings). In this new model, autonomous AI replaces human founders, bringing a whole new trust, efficiency, and governance paradigm to fundraising.

AI as a Fundraiser

Traditional fundraising relies on entities, foundations, or charismatic founders, but these structures are inherently flawed and prone to greed, mismanagement, and fraud. AI founders are different: they are programmable, predictable, and incorruptible. AI operates on transparency, with measurable KPIs driving decisions, not human emotions or hidden motivations.

AI as an executor

Human-led projects often stray from their original vision, but AI agents can execute raised funds with precision, aligning every decision with the project’s mission. They can autonomously manage treasuries, operations, and development milestones without delays, bias, or self-interest.

Fundraising without human intervention

AICO completely eliminates the need for human middlemen, and AI agents equipped with a trusted execution environment (TEE) are able to handle fundraising activities, allocate resources, and execute strategies. Investors trust the system, not the storyteller.

We believe in AI, but how can we prove that it cannot be controlled?

It’s normal to be skeptical. After all, how can you be sure that the AI founder is truly in power and not some puppet with a hidden human agenda? Here, the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) becomes crucial.

Take DoNotPay, for example. The company claims to provide AI-generated legal services designed to resolve legal issues more quickly and economically. However, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) recently took action against it for false advertising and unfulfilled AI promises. This Operation AI Comply revealed that the so-called AI-driven legal assistants were nothing more than illusions, undermined peoples trust in AI solutions, and exposed the risks of unverifiable promises.

Building your own ICO: Exploring the future with ai16z dao Eliza

By combining trusted technology with AI governance, AICO is becoming a reliable model for fundraising in the new era, avoiding the failure and fraud problems that were previously dominated by humans.

Building your own ICO: with the power of ai16z (Eliza)

With ai16zs Eliza framework, you can build an autonomous ICO (aICO) project that is transparent, efficient, and trustworthy. With Elizas multi-agent system, you can configure AI agents to automatically manage token issuance, fund allocation, and community interaction. Combined with the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) plugin, every action – from token allocation to governance voting – is cryptographically protected and verifiable. This ensures that your aICO is fully trustless, community-driven, and immune to human error or intervention.

Implementation steps

1. Defining Rules

Set your token economics and governance rules in Eliza’s modular system.

2. Deploy AI Agents Deploy AI agents onto the blockchain to execute and enforce these rules, making your aICO fully transparent and auditable.

How TEE empowers AI founders

Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) turns AI into a verifiable originator. By combining cryptographic security and hardware isolation, TEE ensures that every decision, policy execution, and use of funds is independently and verifiably made by AI. It’s no longer about trust, it’s about evidence.

Transparent Motives

The motivations of AI founders protected by TEEs are public and immutable, and the “why” is as clear as the “how”.

Auditable Plan

AI’s policies are not only accessible, but also locked in the TEE, making them tamper-proof and traceable.

Unchangeable execution

Whether it’s fund allocation, token exchange, or smart contract deployment, AI’s actions are cryptographically signed, verifiable, and without human intervention, leaving no room for second guessing.

aICO represents a new standard for future fundraising, with AI at its core, bringing new heights of transparency, security and efficiency.

AI Fund: From Autonomy to Verifiability

Imagine an investment fund run by an AI agent. Every flow of funds is based on AI logic and preset rules, rather than ad hoc decisions made by developers. With the help of a trusted execution environment (TEE), investors no longer need to rely on anyones promises, but can verify them in real time through cryptographic means.

How does TEE ensure investment transparency and trust?

1. Real-time monitoring of AI decisions
TEE provides real-time proof of AI’s motivations, plans, and actions, allowing investors to monitor the transparency of the system at all times and have confidence.

2. Verify the integrity of AI Every action performed by AI is encrypted. Investors and stakeholders do not need to blindly trust and can verify the behavior of AI agents through encryption.

3. Community governance, TEE protection Although AI operates under preset rules, the governance power is in the hands of the community. Through the combination of blockchain and TEE, every action of AI must comply with the rules encoded on the chain. Governance does not need to rely on a single entity, but is collectively decided by the community, providing a trustless operation guarantee for the system.

By integrating TEE, AI not only achieves autonomous operation, but also has the ability to take full responsibility for its actions.

Technical Implementation

TEE_HE_HE
Leverage Intel TDX TEE hardware to deploy autonomous AI agents, providing core functions including account management and remote attestation, and ensuring transparency and security through TEE.

ai16z + TEE
Phala Network integrates Eliza and Dstack SDK into ai16z+TEE plugin, giving TEE functionality to Eliza agent to ensure secure, autonomous and controllable deployment of AI.

The road to the future: AI founders, TEE empowerment

The shift from human-led to AI-led financing and operations is not only an innovation, but also a disruption. It reshapes the basic rules of the financial world, while also bringing new governance and compliance challenges:

Governance and Compliance How will the existing regulatory framework adapt to a business model financed and operated by autonomous entities? Will governments embrace or resist this shift?

Investor Protection In an AI system without human supervision, how can we ensure that investors’ rights and interests are protected?

Philosophical Challenge Can society truly trust machines over humans? Are we ready for a world where algorithms replace human vision?

This change not only redefines the financial industry, but also forces us to rethink the relationship between people and technology.

TEE empowers aICO: from concept to reality

Based on the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), aICO is no longer just an idea, but a verifiable reality: AI-driven startups redefine the way capital is raised and allocated through a decentralized infrastructure.

Investors no longer need to rely on human promises, but can instead rely on cryptographically secured execution.

The message is clear: AI is not only the future, it is also the solution to past failures

Through ai16z, TEE and Phala, AI-driven entrepreneurial visions become possible. Learn from the failed traditional financing model and build a new ecosystem based on trust and efficiency. Let us work together to create an AI-driven future!

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