- Despite the bear market, total ICO profit is equal to 12.8 billion USD
- Nevertheless, most projects’ own token holdings’ value has plunged
- Some projects are transferring large amounts their own token holdings out of team-controlled address clusters
2018 was the year of ICOs. Numerous projects have raised tens of millions of USD, with a significant amount of own tokens released remaining under control of an appropriate team. Since then, the values of these holdings have changed significantly, with most teams experiencing big losses. BitMEX has provided detailed statistics for the major ICOs.
The big picture
Despite the bearish market, total ICO projects’ profit is equal to 12.8 billion USD. The total amount of losses is 16.8 billion USD while the total amount of funds raised equals 29.6 billion USD with the equivalent of 5.4 billion dollars raised in Ethereum and the remaining 24.2 billion raised in own issued tokens. BitMEX report focused on analyzing what exactly happened since to these tokens worth 24.2 billion USD.
Combining the above with our analysis of the Ethereum holdings in the project treasury accounts, it looks like ICO teams may have made almost US$13 billion from the ICO process.https://t.co/NTXHg0J3pJ
Thanks to @jai_prasad17 and @ankitchiplunkar from @thetokenanalyst pic.twitter.com/jHrUkjZBpW
— BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) January 16, 2019
Top performers and losers
The number of teams that saw the value of their own token holdings increase post-ICO is relatively small. Among the top gainers are Binance with their BNB coin (+117 million USD), MANA (+127 million USD) and Golem with GNT coin (+31 million USD). A notable mention is Brave team (+14 million USD), whose BAT token had a price surge in last year’s November.
On the other end of the spectrum are the projects that experienced severe losses of their holdings’ value. The projects that suffered the most are Veritasseum (-3196 million USD), SingularityNET (-814 million USD) and Polymath (-727 million USD). It is worth mentioning that most ICOs lost between 5 and 500 million US dollars.  Â
Also, while approximately third of the teams mentioned in the report did not transfer the tokens away from the team cluster, most did. The leader in this regard is Huobi exchange that has transferred 366 million USD worth of its Huobi Tokens away from its team cluster. Other notable mentions are QASH (177 million USD worth of tokens transferred) and Decentraland (95 million USD worth of tokens transferred).
With ICOs showing mostly losses, will we have a second wave of them? Although it is possible, the prolonged bear market, with the ever-decreasing investor trust and increasing government regulation do not provide a good environment for this to happen.
