Morning Report: For Your Enjoyment, Here Are The Most Recent Insane ICO Headlines

Morning Report: Here are the latest dispatches of bizarro-crypto-land. In this land, the money is endless and potential is all the promise enthusiast investors need.

We here at Crunchbase News would very much like to return to our usual fare of startups, revenue, venture capital, and no liquidity, but the crypto world simply won’t let us. Our stated focus is covering the intersection of private, growth-oriented companies and money; if we were to ignore cryptos completely, we’d be in breach of our own charter.

Follow Crunchbase News on Twitter & Facebook

So, today, again, let’s chat briefly about initial coin offerings, better known as ICOs. (For a primer on what an ICO is, head here. For notes on the biggest ICOs to date, head here.)

This weekend two headlines caught our eye, both sourced from Techmeme’s regular feed. As I can’t improve on either clustering of coverage, here they are as they appeared:

I have precisely nothing against projects that I don’t understand getting funded. But I can’t help but note a growing mismatch in terms of potential usage and dollars raised in these ICOs. Given the nascency of much of the crypto-world, some of the dollar amounts being thrown around seem excessive. Of course, many “investors” in these ICOs are merely plowing recent ethereum-soured paper profits into a second slot machine, but the liquid cryptos they are disbursing do have exchange value, making the group transactions material.

Unless, of course, we end up using the 0x protocol to trade ERC-20 compliant tokens — sans the need of a centralized exchange! — to help us buy digital land in Decentraland, which I am sure will be populated with interesting people ready to chat about things that are not cryptos. Then the above is all quite silly.

Or not. Regardless, it really does feel like, for ICOs, the old dotcom fever is back and as deadly as ever.

From the Crunchbase Daily:

Immelt said to top Uber CEO list

• Former General Electric chief executive Jeff Immelt has emerged as the leading candidate to become CEO of Uber, according to a Recode report citing unnamed sources. Uber’s board is reportedly expected to vote on the hire in the next two weeks.

Capital Float raises $45M

• Capital Float, a provider of loans to Indian small businesses, closed a $45 million Series C round led by Ribbit Capital and joined by returning investors SAIF Partners, Sequoia India, and Creation Investments. The four-year-old company has raised a total of $87 million in equity funding to date.

Cryptos worth more than unicorns

• Bitcoin’s recent bull run reflects how the overall crypto market is doing in recent months, with the total market cap of cryptocurrencies now exceeding the value of top unicorns Airbnb, SpaceX and WeWork put together, Crunchbase News reports. In other news, we talk to Barbary Brunner, CEO of the Austin Technology Council, about tech industry gender issues and about what makes the Texas startup scene unique.

iStockPhoto / OnePopPhoto