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Because of the current ICO frenzy, one may be led to believe that ANY project involving blockchains (especially Ethereum) has virtually the same chance to get funded, as investors are just rushing to throw money at anything that smells like a blockchain...

And yet...professional investors are somehow waiting for a Holy Grail project still to be uncovered!

The fashionable word to describe this is "blockchain-enabled convergence". It is widely felt that the killer app for blockchain technology (or DLT) will result from a strong synergy between DT and one (or more) of these:

Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The Internet of Things (IoT)
Autonomous Robotics (Drones & Autonomous Vehicles)
Virtual Reality (VR) & Augmented Reality (AR)
3D Printing

People at Outlier Ventures are strongly advocating this belief, and they are probably right.

In particular, everybody is waiting for a good DLT+IoT project to run an ICO.

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On paper, the IoT arena yields a few strong use cases for DLT (for a review, see here) and there are a few companies out there which are setting forth a convincing business case.

Leaving aside IBM's Watson platform (they certainly don't need an ICO), you have 21.co which offers to monetize IoT sensor data through a pay-per-API-call model. Filament on the other hand focuses on the delivery of secure wireless data transmission protocols for sensors. While these companies probably don't need extra funding, as both are backed by strong investors, I can hardly understand why no other DLT/IoT player has run an ICO yet.

We'll see...