By
Kofi Ansah
September 20th, 2022
European continent proves to be the hotspot for financial innovation and has contributed almost half of the $3.8 billion ICO funds to the cryptocurrency markets this year.
Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) had a good as well as bad time in 2017. The first-half of 2017 witnessed a boom in the ICO markets and many optimistic investors were quite a lot inclined to park their funds against the tokens offered by new startups and companies.
The companies also had a great time raising funds through this decentralized manner without the intervention of any third-party-financial institutions like banks or any other intermediate regulatory agencies. It was like a direct interaction between the companies and the investors wherein the companies would pledge their own tokens against the equivalent valuation of Bitcoins, Ethereum etc. The result was that the ICOs market itself contributed over $3.8 billion to the cryptocurrency markets.
Atomico’s report, entitled as “The State of European Tech”, has recently revealed the data that Europe has proved to be a hotbed of fundraising through ICOs as nearly fifty percent of the amount raised has come from this continent. As per the reports, since 2014, European-based entities have raised over $1.76 billion contributing a 46% of global fundraising through ICOs.
Atomico is one of the leading venture capital firms in Europe. The data compilation for this report is done by California-based Token Data – a startup tracking ICOs, in addition to Atomico’s own survey of startup founders and investors.
As per researcher Ricky Tan, the report says that 90% of the ICO activity has taken place in last one year. Ricky expects this figure to increase in the coming years in spite of the fact that several government regulatory bodies, from different countries like China-South Korea and others, have banned ICOs sighting to its illicit ways of fundraising.
Ricky said: “We see a pattern of geographical diversity between ICO founding teams and also within the teams themselves. If the future of business ideas lies in decentralization, then decentralized founding teams will be a key aspect of it.”
The report further suggests that among the entire Europe, Switzerland proves to be a haven for all the ICO activities in the continent and alone contributes 47 percent or $828 million of the total ICO funds in the region. Majority of the firms raising funds through ICOs are placed in Zug, a small place near Zurich which is home to several top commodities traders and also famous for the low tax within the region. Other countries in the region who have participated in the ICO boom include Germany, Austria and UK.
In comparison to Europe, USA has managed to raise above $1 billion in ICO funds which is approximately 28 percent of the global $3.8 billion ICO market. One of the major reasons that startup companies have been flocking their wins to the European continent is because of the general friendliness of the region towards cryptocurrencies and less stringent regulations.
Also, as per the report, Central and Eastern Europe dominate the rest of the region with 162 ICO projects being launched, followed by 90 projects in Ireland and Britain. There is no doubt to the fact that Europe has proved itself as the hotspot financial and technological innovation and has been an active participant in the FinTech revolution.
