---
type: claim
domain: internet-finance
description: "2017-era token launches failed not from fraud but from mechanism design: teams controlling treasury had increasing incentive to extract as token value grew, with no governance check"
confidence: likely
source: "Catalini and Gans (2018), SEC enforcement actions (2018-2020), empirical ICO performance data"
created: 2026-04-21
secondary_domains: [mechanisms]
related_claims:
  - "mechanism-design-changes-the-game-itself-to-produce-better-equilibria-rather-than-expecting-players-to-find-optimal-strategies"
  - "the-vickrey-auction-makes-honesty-the-dominant-strategy-by-paying-winners-the-second-highest-bid-rather-than-their-own"
---

# Legacy ICOs failed because team treasury control created extraction incentives that scaled with success

The 2017 ICO wave raised approximately $20 billion, with the vast majority of projects failing to deliver. The standard narrative attributes this to fraud and speculation. The mechanism design explanation is more precise: the ICO structure created extraction incentives that were proportional to success, with no governance mechanism to prevent exercise of those incentives.

The structure: team raises funds by selling tokens. Team controls the treasury (unsold tokens + raised capital). Token price rises with market interest. Team's incentive to extract (sell treasury tokens, redirect development funds) grows linearly with token price. The governance check is nothing. Token holders have no binding vote over treasury management. Legal recourse is limited by jurisdictional arbitrage. Reputation effects are weak in pseudonymous markets.

This is not a moral failure but a mechanism design failure. The incentive structure would produce extraction in ANY population of agents, not just bad actors. In fact, the better the project performed, the stronger the extraction incentive became -- success itself created the conditions for abandonment. A team sitting on $100M of tokens has a stronger extraction incentive than a team sitting on $1M, regardless of the team's initial intentions.

The comparison to traditional equity is instructive: corporate governance evolved over centuries to address precisely this problem. Board oversight, fiduciary duty, securities regulation, audit requirements -- all are mechanisms that constrain insiders' ability to extract from a growing enterprise. ICOs discarded all of these mechanisms without replacing them with functional equivalents.

The lesson for future token launch design: any mechanism where value accrues to an entity that controls its own treasury without binding governance will produce extraction at scale. The fix is structural: governance mechanisms that make extraction costlier than continued development. Futarchy-governed treasuries, vesting schedules enforced by smart contracts, and community-controlled spending are all attempts to engineer the extraction incentive away.

## Evidence
- 2017-2018 ICO performance: over 80% of tokens traded below ICO price within 12 months (Ernst and Young, 2018)
- SEC enforcement actions (2018-2020) -- dozens of cases documenting team extraction patterns
- Catalini and Gans (2018) -- formal economic model showing ICO structure creates adverse selection: high-extraction teams have strongest incentive to launch
- Successful exceptions (Ethereum) -- survived because of unusually strong founder commitment, not because of mechanism design that prevented extraction

## Challenges
- Some ICOs failed for legitimate reasons (technical failure, market timing, competition) unrelated to extraction incentives
- Vesting schedules and governance mechanisms can be gamed if the team controls the governance process (circular problem)
