Cobie Joins ICO 2.0 Wave with Public Token Sale Platform Sonar

Echo, the private group fundraising platform led by Jordan Fish, also known as Cobie, just announced its new public token sale platform, Sonar.

Per an official X post from Echo, Sonar was created to do what Echo doesn’t — let projects self-host public token sales. Echo’s structure, on the other hand, is designed to keep fundraising deals private and confidential, only available to members of Echo groups.

The platform features a variety of sale methods, and an official blog post from Echo mentions distribution methods such as auctions, options drops, points systems, and variable valuations and allocations sizes on any blockchain. In terms of supported blockchains, the post implies multi-chain support, and specifically mentions Hyperliquid, Solana and Cardano.

The post from Echo clarifies that Sonar is not intended to be a token launchpad platform, where new token sales are aggregated and advertised by the platform itself:

“At Echo, we don’t really like launchpads. We think the incentives are a mess. So, we intentionally built Sonar in a way where founders self-host their sale”

Rather, the intention and design is so that projects can use Sonar as an interface to list their public token sales, with the platform providing customizable sale methods, as mentioned above, as well as compliance tools.

ICO 2.0

The introduction of Sonar is the latest effort in a new wave of attempts to improve on the initial coin offering (ICO) model, which reached its peak in 2017. Generally, newer token sale models focus on ensuring fair public token sales and regulatory compliance.

The term “ICO” for many became synonymous with scam or at least a hotbed for scams, as there were numerous examples of projects selling tokens based on little more than a whitepaper and a website.

In contrast, Echo’s official X thread about Sonar emphasizes “configurable compliance.” Projects can customize and set up their own restrictions for participation based on their compliance needs — such as which jurisdictions the sale is available in — and Sonar provides various compliance tools.

In what was evidently a cheeky nod to ICOs’ reputation, the example of Sonar’s interface that Echo shared features a well-known scam, Bitconnect, that had an ICO in late 2016, while Sam Bankman-Fried is shown as the investor.

Echo’s official announcement concludes “Our goal with Sonar is to get as close to ICO-era market dynamics as possible, while providing compliant tools for founders who don’t want to go to jail etc.”