The Dutch auction is the rarest form of ICO offering, but one of the fairest. A Dutch auction works with the auction beginning at a high price, with the price slowly lowered until participants jump in or a reserve is hit. A reverse Dutch auction starts at a low price, and the price is then slowly raised over time at fixed intervals. Either approach is good for finding a proper market price for a token, provided that there are a sufficient number of buyers. The most famous ICO to use the Dutch auction approach was the Gnosis project.

The Gnosis team did not set out to sell a fixed percentage of the total tokens. Instead, the number of tokens released would increase the longer the auction took to hit the cap of $9 million GNO tokens sold, or $12.5 million raised. Despite the auction setup designed to slow down participation, the sale was over in under 15 minutes.