An Initial Coin Offering (or ICO) is a method for teams to raise funds for a project in the cryptocurrency space. In an ICO, teams generate blockchain-based tokens to sell to early supporters. This serves as a crowdfunding phase – users receive tokens that they can use (either immediately or in the future), and the project receives money to fund development.

An Initial Exchange Offering, commonly referred to as an IEO, is a fundraising event that is administered by an exchange. In contrast to an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) where the project team themselves conduct the fundraising, an Initial Exchange Offering means that the fundraising will be conducted on a well-known exchange’s fundraising platform, such as Binance Launchpad, where users can purchase tokens with funds directly from their own exchange wallet.

Consensus algorithms enable network participants to agree on the contents of a blockchain in a distributed and trust-less manner.“Consensus decision-making is a group decision-making process in which group members develop, and agree to support a decision in the best interest of the whole. Consensus may be defined professionally as an acceptable resolution, one that can be supported, even if not the “favourite” of each individual. Consensus is defined by Merriam-Webster as, first, general agreement, and second, group solidarity of belief or sentiment.” Wikipedia

The proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism works using an algorithm that selects participants with the highest stakes as validators, assuming that the highest stakeholders are incentivized to ensure a transaction is processed. The idea is that those with the most coins in circulation have the most to lose so they are positioned to work in the interest of the network. The amount of coins that a network may require changes just like the difficulty in PoW.In PoS, the blocks aren’t created by miners doing work, but by minters staking their tokens to “bet” on which blocks are valid. In the case of a fork, minters spend their tokens voting on which fork to support. Assuming most people vote on the correct fork, validators who voted on the wrong fork would “lose their stake” in the correct one. The common argument against proof-of-stake is the Nothing at Stake problem. The concern is that since it costs validators almost no computational power to support a fork unlike PoW, validators could vote for both sides of every fork that happens. Forks in PoS could then be much more common than in PoW, which some people worry could harm the credibility of the currency.

PoW was originally invented as a means to combat spam (see hashcash)if you make it computationally expensive to send email then spamming would be cost prohibitive while still being almost free for a normal user to send email.Bitcoin, which made the blockchain technology popular, developed the so-called Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm. In principle, each participant on the Bitcoin network can participate in the block generation. In order to confirm the transaction and enter a block into the blockchain, a miner has to provide an answer, or a proof, to a specific challenge. Miners use PoW to validate transactions and mining new coins, but its main goal is to block potential cyber-attacks or suspicious activities within the network.

Reward for generating blocks (Proof-of-Stake, POS). This involves running a full node, unlocked and with the user's stake applied to generate blocks. Users who run a block generating node generally need to have at least a moderate amount of token on their account

Proof of History is a sequence of computation that can provide a way to cryptographically verify passage of time between two events. It uses a cryptographically secure function written so that output cannot be predicted from the input, and must be completely executed to generate the output. The function is run in a sequence on a single core, its previous output as the current input, periodically recording the current output, and how many times its been called. The output can then be re-computed and verified by external computers in parallel by checking each sequence segment on a separate core. Data can be timestamped into this sequence by appending the data (or a hash of some data) into the state of the function. The recording of the state, index and data as it was appended into the sequences provides a timestamp that can guarantee that the data was created sometime before the next hash was generated in the sequence. This design also supports horizontal scaling as multiple generators can synchronize amongst each other by mixing their state into each others sequences.

Proof of work (PoW) is a form of cryptographic proof in which one party (the prover) proves to others (the verifiers) that a certain amount of a specific computational effort has been expended.[1] Verifiers can subsequently confirm this expenditure with minimal effort on their part. The concept was invented by Moni Naor and Cynthia Dwork in 1993 as a way to deter denial-of-service attacks and other service abuses such as spam on a network by requiring some work from a service requester, usually meaning processing time by a computer. The term "proof of work" was first coined and formalized in a 1999 paper by Markus Jakobsson and Ari Juels.

Proof-of-stake underlies certain consensus mechanisms used by blockchains to achieve distributed consensus. In proof-of-work, miners prove they have capital at risk by expending energy. Ethereum uses proof-of-stake, where validators explicitly stake capital in the form of ETH into a smart contract on Ethereum. This staked ETH then acts as collateral that can be destroyed if the validator behaves dishonestly or lazily. The validator is then responsible for checking that new blocks propagated over the network are valid and occasionally creating and propagating new blocks themselves.