The ICORating portal published a report on the initial coin offering (ICO) industry covering the third quarter of the current year, in which it came to disappointing conclusions.
In their welcoming message, analysts admit that the Q3 was not as successful as the second or first. Major features of the third quarter were:
- Overall disappointment in traditional ICOs
- Security token offerings
- Development of regulation
- A fall in the value of strongly-hyped and highly backed projects of 2017 and early 2018.
“The market in Q3 shows signs of overall disappointment in traditional ICOs as a means of venture financing,” writes ICORating.
Among the reasons for this are:
- Significant drop in profitability for ICO participants,
- An aggravated problem of low transparency of teams/projects,
- General decline in the market,
- More informed decisions of investors,
- Regulators’ decisions,
- Lack of new ideas among project teams
- Low speed of blockchain implementation in traditional markets.
Analysts also point out that the situation is complicated by the continued spread of fraudulent or simply dubious projects, as well as restrictions for the U.S. citizens who, in the light of the recent actions of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), are the few people to ignore.
A total of 597 projects were analyzed, which completed their ICOs in the third quarter and collected $1,819,585,090. For comparison, in the second quarter ICO projects collected $8,359,976,282.
In the third quarter, 57% of ICOs said that they managed to collect no more than $100,000. All projects that attracted up to half a million dollars accounted for $6,689,924 in a total funding. Most did not reach the stated goals.
Below are the largest ICO projects for the specified period. The average amount of attracted funding for them was $33 million.
And this is what the largest ICO project looks like, having completed its campaign in the third quarter, compared to the projects that have completed attracting funding throughout 2018.
Only 4% of ICOs in the third quarter went public (7% in Q2). Nineteen percent of projects that previously announced their intention to hold an ICO, this quarter removed their social media accounts and websites (9% in Q2).
It is also noteworthy that only projects related to marketing and advertising industries were able to show positive ROI, while investors in other industries suffered losses - the largest in the asset management industry.
In addition, for the third quarter, 63 teams with Russian roots in total collected $182.9 million - the highest value among all countries, but a large number of projects did not allow Russian teams to become leaders in the average amount of funds raised. The most effective in the context of attracting funding were the Spaniards and Singaporeans.
In October, Autonomous Research data showed that the activity around ICO has fallen by 90% since the beginning of the year.
At the same, according to the report recently presented by E&Y, 86% of tokens today are cheaper than at the time of placement on the exchanges, and 30% of them have lost any value they had. So your chances of success if you decide to invest in an ICO are about 1:10.
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