By
Bhushan Akolkar
May 14th, 2024
Although the cryptocurrency market has witnessed a significant slowdown, the ICO market is going rock-solid in 2018.
We are in the sixth month of 2018, and so far the cryptocurrency market is seen on a significant slowdown with some little signs of its revival at the moment. Since the beginning of 2018, the overall market valuation has dived by more than 50% currently making $335 billion. Almost all of the top-most digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and others have corrected by 50% since the start of the year.
However, on the other hand, the market for Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) has gained in comparison to the last year. As per the latest report from CoinSchedule, investments in ICOs have skyrocketed as the ICO-market has managed to raise a whopping $9.5 billion since the start of 2018. A close observation of the data shows that two main ICOs – Telegram and Petro – have emerged as the major market pullers. The pre-sale of the digital tokens for these two ICOs alone contributed to the fundraising of more than $2.4 billion, which amounts to 25% of the total funds raised through ICOs.
While talking to Bloomberg, Alex Michaelis, co-founder of popular ICO tracker, CoinSchedule said that his hopes are still alive for the ICO sub-industry. In one of the emails, Michaelis wrote:
“The ICO market is still hot. EOS and Telegram have been big successful ICOs this year, albeit not a classic ICO in the sense that Telegram was closed to private investors only, and EOS has been trading in exchanges for a while, which influences the token price.”
These latest figures show that in spite of several countries having a crackdown on ICOs, they have still managed to do considerably well. A significant crackdown on ICOs started last year in September 2017 with China and South Korea pulling-the-plug of ICO operations within their local cryptocurrency market. However, analysts and experts later found out that the ICO-market has been laden with multiple fraudulent schemes which have been trapping gullible investors with the promise of unrealistic and overwhelming returns.
This caused the regulatory bodies from around the globe to hunt for such fraud schemes operating in their respective local markets, and thus protect the investor interests. In the recent past, we have seen regulatory bodies like the SEC and CFTC discussing whether digital tokens in ICOs should be treated as securities or not. As a result, the overall enthusiasm of investors in the ICO-market has also settled down to a great extent.
Much recently, regulatory bodies from the U.S and Canada have started to hunt for the fraudulent coin offerings along with other crypto-related operations that are perceived to be scams. These government-affiliated organizations have carried near 60 investigations into a number of different questionable projects out of which nearly 35 projects are facing legal action.
Meanwhile, even given all the crackdowns and officials’ hunting for fraud schemes resulting in ever toughening regulation, this means of fundraising leads the charge showing no sign of diminishing popularity.