More than half of startups lose value after an ICO

Although in 2018, ICOs raised twice as much as in the previous year, this fundraising mechanism is beginning to lose popularity. According to Diar, 70% of the tokens offered through the public offering are worth less than their original price.

Public ICO statistics provided by Token Data indicate that in August 2018, only 17 tokens successfully completed a funding round - the smallest number for the entire year. Ricky Tan, founder of Token Data, believes that in 2018 ICOs and presales will no longer be able to gain momentum. 

Nevertheless, despite the prolonged bearish trend, investors invested almost $12 billion in ICOs. Their profits, with the exception of a few projects, were meager by any measure. 402 of the 562 projects that had a post-raise capitalization of ~$8.2 billion are now worth approximately $2.2 billion—meaning their market capitalization has fallen by $6 billion from what they raised at the time of funding. 

In fact, most cryptocurrencies that are not in the top 20 have lost $700 million or more from their initial capitalization. Although the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies is now more than $200 billion, according to Diar, the majority of this amount belongs to the top five of the ranking, while the capitalization of all others is at the level of $35 billion. 

Sirin Labs, the third largest ICO, which raised $158 million, had enough funds to convince one of the most popular football players of our time - Lionel Messi - to become the face of their brand. However, this did not help the company maintain the price of the token.

In fact, the token of the project, which was supposed to provide funding for the “new blockchain phone”, is showing the worst performance, at the moment its capitalization has fallen by $141 million. According to the developers, the phone should be released at the end of November.

Over the past 12 months, initial placements have shown record amounts of fees, compared to which funding for top cryptocurrencies looks very modest. With the exception of EOS, top projects have collected $380 million - and at the moment their capitalization is at $6.7 billion. 

Despite this, success in token sales has played into the hands of developers - some teams have more than $2.6 billion that they can use to fund future developments.

According to https://diar.co/