These new tokens were sold by start-ups to fund the development of apps, just like Willett did with MasterCoin. Their founders promised the coins would be useful once the apps were created. It was as if the Wright Brothers sold air miles to finance inventing the airplane, in the words of Money Stuff columnist Matt Levine. A new programmable blockchain called Ethereum made the process easy. The token sales were called “initial coin offerings,” or ICOs.
