Jarrod Dicker, CEO of Po.et, which uses blockchain technology to protect digital creative assets, talked with TechRepublic’s Dan Patterson about initial coin offerings (ICOs.).

Watch the video, or read the transcript of their conversation below:

Patterson:Let’s talk about your ICO and ICOs, in general. For the uninitiated, first explain how an ICO occurs, and how is this dissimilar than an IPO?

Dicker:Right, so you’re kind of skipping a whole step, right, when you’re going the route of the ICO. And I think the coolest part about it, in terms of how it affects Po.et, but I think how it affects a lot of other valuable companies that are doing ICOs the right way, right. Because we could have conversations about all of the companies that are doing ICOs-

Patterson:All day long.

Dicker:Right, and unfortunately, right, it sets a bad tone for the opportunity that they bring. What I think is great about it, is you basically are directly affected by people investing in your project and believing in your project. And again, not to say that the entire ICO wave sits this way.

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In fact, I’d say 95% of them don’t, and I feel lucky that Po.et is in this bucket, and you can see it through our community on Telegram, and Reddit, and Twitter, and so forth, that people that are participating in Po.et want to know exactly what is the value of the token? What is the value of the marketplace? How could I start leveraging this today?

Right, we built Frost API, which allows anyone with WordPress, or Drupal, or Joomla, or any other CMS to start stamping content to the blockchain today, and we have an entire community that’s engaged and excited about those sort of things, and they were also investors, right, for the most part, in early adoption of the Po.et platform. So I think it’s still early days, right, when it comes to ICOs, especially ICOs as security versus ICOs as utility, and that’s kind of an open conversation that’s happening, that’s kind of blowing with, based on how government and regulation decides to sit on it.

Now I think the ICO companies that truly see value in kind of the opportunity around it are doing it the right way and will be successful in doing that. But I think that it’s something that deservingly has some sort of skeptical connotation around it because it’s still early days. But, yes, Po.et is an ICO company. They ICO’d in August.

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