I feel like a lot of ICOs are simply used to try to capture a piece of the cryptocurrency/ICO hype and avoid securities regulations, but there’s no advtange to users.
We floated a User Growth Pool (UGP) of 300M tokens + 60M+ in reserve, created by fiat. These tokens were created before the sale and not sold. They're fungible, indistinguishable from other BAT created pre-sale for lockup to team & advisors, and from the one billion BAT sold on 5/31.
This idea was inspired by social credit currency, issued to citizens to endow them with funds. It can't be done with existing cryptocurrencies unless someone rich does it out of charity. The UGP has notional value between $40M and $110M. No moneybags in sight was volunteering to donate that much BTC or ETH to us.
We had two goals with the sale: endow the UGP, and fund the project. BAT is an ERC20 token so has many decimal places of fractional precision. As we grow, gain users who contribute starting from $0 cost to the user (via grants from the UGP, and even matching contributions for some months), prototype and ship user-paying private ads, and add other apps, BAT should become more valuable and our initial and matching grants can reduce to keep about the same value in USD or other fiats ($5 for initial grant, still working out matching details).
Hope this helps. We're playing the long game here. If the ecosystem expands and Ethereum solves scaling and anonymity on-chain, we will have the only decentralized, user-first and user-private/ZKP-anonymous funding model for the Web.
Here's a pie chart of token holders, where you can see the UGP+reserves, Bittrex (an exchange with BAT held for liquidity provisioning), the team+advisor lockup, and smaller accounts:
https://etherscan.io/token/tokenholderchart/0x0d8775f6484306...