LAToken Research: ICOs Disrupting VC Market with $5B raised in 2017

By the end of 2017, total ICO funding is going to exceed $5B with top-10 projects raising up to $250M from a single ICO event. The current run rate of over $600M per month surpasses traditional early-stage fundraising by a multiple, as the angel and seed-stage VC investments were running at less than $300 million per month as of July.

So it’s no surprise that since June monthly number of ICOs have increased from 40 to 200 projects. November set a new record with 180 of closed token sales. This also resulted in a growing number of ICO projects struggling to raise funds as the competition for investors’ attention intensifies.

LAToken Research Team prepared an ICO trends review, which was initially presented at the biggest Eastern European Blockchain conference, Cryptospace, and is now available for the public view.

The rise and rise of ICOs

In 2017 holding an ICO event has become a viable alternative to VC funding. An average ICO proceeds have reached $15M, meaning that blockchain startups could raise as much through crowdfunding as mainstream startups from VCs during Series A or B.

The success stories of Top ICOs are impressing: 10 largest token sales have raised a total of $1.5B, with Top-5 ICOs raising $145M+. In September Filecoin, a data storage network backed by an application token was able to raise $257M that appeared to be the biggest deal in 2017.

At the same time, the number of ICO has rocketed from 8 in January to 180 in November with more projects struggling to raise funds. The largest amount of ICOs held happened in October 2017 and was measured up to 231 ICOs.

The Main ICO Areas

Blockchain infrastructure and financial services are the most lucrative areas for investors as the total amount of investments via ICOs equaled to $2,4B, according to LAToken Research. Three notable examples are Tezos, TenX, and EOS – both have raised 180m+ during their token sales.

Trading Platforms have also attracted a lot of interest with $451M raised. One of the projects – QASH – a globally-sourced trading platform that provides liquidity to the crypto economy has collected $108M during a two-day ICO. Computing and AI industries also look very appealing to the crypto investors with $389M raised.

Outperforming Bitcoin

Some of the ICO tokens, namely Qtum, Edgeless Melon and ChronoBank, turned out to be better investments than BTC in 2017.

Where ICOs are born

The United States, Singapore, and Russian have been the leaders in ICO adoption, as more than half of ICO of 2017 were launched in those 3 countries. Despite uncertainties with legislation, investors are staying positive.

Russia and the US are also world leaders in “bitcoin” web search popularity, LAToken Research shows.

All in all, ICO market shows no signs of slow down. «We believe that in 2018 ICOs will stay a very attractive option for raising money, so the number of token sales will continue to grow. But more ICO projects will struggle to raise funds as the competition for investors’ attention intensifies. We also estimate that the amount money raised by successful projects will increase in line with the growth of the total crypto market. As soon as investors’ attention switch from rapidly growing Top-20 cryptocurrencies, ICOs can become a hot topic again,» says Founder of LAToken Valentin Preobrazhenskiy.

Read more in our ICO trends review – sale.latoken.com/analytics

LAToken is listing selected ICOs on its Platform where they can get contributions from 40k+ users and 800k+ website visitors, use LAToken KYC and Wallet/payment infrastructure, and participate at LAToken Conferences and Meetups with top blockchain investors around the world.

For details contact us at ceo@latoken.com