June 11th, 2017, 2:38 pm
You should be a little more clear about acronyms.. anyways I think you're talking about Initial Coin Offerings. An ICO is basically the launch of a new cryptocurrency. Issuers release coins to "early" adopters in order to get financing to cover development expenses. Early adopters, who are long on the new currency, bet that the exchange ratio with "real" money goes up in order to make a profit. They can realize profits by selling their coins or shopping with them at increased purchase power.
In my opinion, the risks of investing in ICO come from the fact that there are basically no regulations on offerings and coins, nor on issuers. Notwithstanding this, the upsides may be very high, since usually newly issued coins are cheap (since they are still not adopted and used, this means that they are also very illiquid).
The number of realized ICOs went up in the last few years, making it extremely hard to understand which may be an interesting investing opportunity.