You've probably heard of The DAO and you've certainly heard of the ICO. Now say hello to the DAICO, an "innovative fundraising model" that aims to combine the best of both frameworks. The Abyss Platform is the first project to utilize this hybrid organizational structure, which has been credited as the brainchild of Vitalik Buterin. There's just one problem with The DAO, the ICO and the mutant DAICO it's spawned – the public couldn't give a damn about key tenets such as voting rights and community governance. All they want is cheap tokens they can flip for a quick profit.

Live and Let DAICO

The DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) was the first major project to be launched on the Ethereum blockchain, complete with a novel governance structure that replaced a board of directors with a community-run model. It didn't end well. A vulnerability in the code saw one third of the ether committed to the project stolen and The DAO collapsed. As prominent crypto critic and all-round mischief-maker Preston Byrne explains:

The original DAO could pass resolutions with a simple majority drawn from quorum of 20% (meaning as little as 10% +1 of the investors could bind the remaining 90%). No resolution ever passed because none of the tokenholders actually cared enough about what the DAO was doing in order to participate. Their primary motivation was to sit on their hands and wait for their investment to pay off.

Byrne may be a perennial bitcoin bear, but as a practising English solicitor, he knows more than most when it comes to the sort of legal matters that DAOs and DAICOs were meant to solve. Take a look at many of this year's ICOs and you'll find, somewhere in their roadmap, talk of token holders being empowered to vote on key protocol changes including platform developments and new features. It all sounds very progressive and democratic, but the trouble is even the loyalest of community members don't care enough to want to micromanage decisions using the power invested in them by tokens. The real reason why ICOs are so eager to assign voting rights to their investors is to add legitimacy to their claim that the token is a utility and not a security.