According to stats from CoinSchedule, one of the biggest ICO listing sites, 955 ICOs have managed to raise close to $22 billion in 2018 so far:
It is not hard to notice the drop in funds raised by more recent initial coin offerings however, if we take a closer look and compare the overall crypto market cap lost since the beginning of the year with the drop in ICO funds raised, then we can see that initial coin offerings are actually still doing relatively well.
For instance, in January this year, Ethereum’s price reached its peak of $1,400 USD before stabilizing at around $1,000 until the end of the month. In September, Ethereum was trading in the range of $200 – $280 USD (as per stats from CoinMarketCap), so the cryptocurrency had dropped roughly 5 times in value compared to its peak from January.
However, if we take a look at the data from CoinSchedule, ICOs raised just over $2 billion in January this year and then raised $1.725 billion in September. Even in October, when the crypto market was quite stagnant, ICOs still raised more than $800 million USD.
Of course, November still looks very bad, but once the ICOs that end this month are finished raising funds, and CoinSchedule gets data on how much they raised, the current $288 million will certainly rise.
There is a good chance November might be the lowest initial coin offerings have raised this year as we watched the crypto market devour itself with speculation and chaos around the Bitcoin Cash split.
However, it is good to see that relative success is still achieved by ICOs, despite the fact that, nowadays crypto investors are far more critical in their approach when compared to 2017 – when apparent scam projects were reaching hard caps in a matter of minutes.