When (or) do ICO tokens go to an exchange?

Question

Scenario: Company A sells "tokens" in an ICO, directly from the site.

• How does one investing in an ICO know if those tokens will or won't, go to an exchange?

• If they will, how would one know the exact date it goes to the exchange?

• How would one know which exchange it will go to?

• How would one find similar alt-coins that are brand new, and trade them?

• Which exchanges (if any) allow sorting on newest altcoins added, to their exchange?

On a similar note:

• There are thousnads of "Ethereum based" ICO tokens, but on Bittrex (for example), the Ethereum market only has a small fraction of those alt-coins....where are all the others?

Answer 1

It is not possible to know such things unless an exchange announces that they will be listing an ICO or if the ICO creator announces that an exchange will be listing an ICO. An ICO being listed is not automatic; humans are involved. In order for an ICO to be listed on an exchange, the exchange operator must manually add it. This can happen either if an ICO becomes extremely large (although there is no guarantee that a large ICO will be listed by an exchange) or if the ICO creator asks exchanges to list the ICO.

The only way to know whether, where, and when an ICO will be listed on an exchange, you will need to follow any announcements from the ICO and from all possible exchanges that the ICO may be listed on.

The same applies for altcoins.

Answer 2

If the tokens issued by the company or person don't make it onto an exchange, then they really don't have any market value. For example, I can create a token called a Lopez token with a supply of 1 Billion (just google "Create own coin") that I can send to my own family members over the Ethereum blockchain. However, unless my family is made up of hundreds of people, no exchange (which is functions as a company) will want to list the Lopez coin, and therefore, my coins really don't have any market value.

It get's trickier with decentralized exchanges, but the same concept applies. Someone out there writes the code that determines which coins get listed.