There were no ICOs in the last 2 years. The community moved on from that. Decentralized non custodial exchange usage is growing, like https://loopring.org/ that’s based on zero knowledge proofs cryptography and allows 2000 trades per second, and the people who built it can’t steal your money even if they wanted to.
There are also decentralized options to protect you from volatility https://opyn.co/ or https://www.hegic.co/
There are many alternatives to Tether, for example USDc or a decentralized stable coin like DAI.