One year after the hype: what's really going on with the ICO market in 2019

Satis Group report

According to the , more than 80 percent of all ICOs held in 2017 turned out to be scams. We analyzed ICO projects that received investments from the 1st of January to the 30th of August 2018 to find out if the situation changed in 2019. Are they still active? Have ICO scams become a rare phenomenon or the other way around?

The findings of the study suggest that only 0.73 percent out of 1226 token sales proved to be profitable for investors. In fact, 77 percent of the projects stopped showing any activity in social media a year after the ICO ended.

This points to one of the serious problems in the ICO market: for most projects, fund-raising has become the ultimate goal. The entire focus was not on product development, but the token sale organization: advertising, website design, hype generation, and so on.

The majority of the analyzed ICO-projects which are still active can hardly be called financially successful. Only 4 percent of tokens issued in 2018 are now being traded at a higher price than the nominal token sale price.

It is estimated that the projects that disappeared from sight when the necessary funds were raised have received approximately $3 billion. In consequence, the decline in ICO's profitability and the growth in the number of fraudulent projects caused an outflow of investors from the market.

Learn more about the ICO market in 2018-2019 by downloading the full version of our study. It is free!