There seem to be nowadays a couple a blockchain solutions that target consortium or private business blockchain solutions and despite planning or doing an ICO or other form of token sales. One of the best such example is Ripple, which offers bank to bank financial services despite that a lot of its XRP tokens can be freely traded in the major exchanges.
Such a constellation seems to be a little bit paradox for the first sight. The problem is that institutional investors still do not really buy tokens, instead most of the tokens are sold for everyday people or to bitcoin whales. Considering a B2C decentralized service this can provide a functioning solution, as most of the tokens are probably bought by people who are actually willing to use the service as well as soon it will be ready. This makes the business adaptation faster and accelerates the network effect as well. However with a B2B service it is very difficult to design a usage token in a way that it can be bought by average people as investment but the system will be working in a consortium scenario possibly between enterprises. Certainly it would be an exception if the token could represent a pure investment possibility, however it would require a huge regulation overhead.
