Next month, a venture capital firm called Blockchain Capital plans to do something that could change the way companies get funded—and perhaps even the way they operate. Instead of an Initial Public Offering, in which a company sells stock via a regulated exchange like Nasdaq, the San Francisco-based VC firm is making an Initial Coin Offering, selling its own digital token as a way of raising money for its latest venture fund. Anyone who buys a token will be buying into the fund.

Yes, they call it an ICO, and over the last 14 months, more than 60 startups, open source projects, and ragtag online communities used this method to raise over $250 million for their own business efforts. "The data shows a ton of momentum at the end of the year," says Matt Chwierut, of Smith and Crown, a new research outfit that tracks this new phenomenon, "and that momentum has only continued."

This isn't just more blather about bitcoin as the future of currency. Yes, many of these online operations are merely trying to create digital currencies that serve as an alternative to bitcoin. The Zcash Electric Coin Company, for instance, recently offered up a currency designed to ensure that financial transactions remain private. But many others are using new internet tokens not as digital currencies per se, but as a way of building an entirely new kind of business.

Take The Golem Project, which bills itself as "AirBnb for computers." This rather elaborate effort aims to create a system that allows anyone to buy computing power from anyone else. But the added trick is that this system will operate outside the control of any one central authority, as a kind of online co-op. Golem recently offered up a digital token that provides a share of the fees generated when services are bought and sold on its network. This token is not quite a currency. And it's not quite a stock. It's a third thing when you thought there were only two.

For now, this strange new breed of business operates outside of government oversight, and nobody is really sure how governments will regulate these kinds of sales. That's where Blockchain Capital comes in. Today, the firm announced that in the US, it will only offer its tokens to accredited investors, as the firm seeks to comply with US regulations. Overseas, any investor can buy the token, which will be called BCAP. The firm plans to release a detailed memorandum describing the offering on April 3, and the offering itself will likely follow after a few more weeks, through an organization based in Singapore. In Singapore, regulators do not consider this kind of digital token to be a security.