The shape of ICOs

Two months ago I had no idea what an ICO was, and now I am immersed in one!

I have been reading lots, connecting with a load of interesting people who know about the crypto-currency, crypto-asset, blockchain world. There is no doubt there is a lot of shady activity, and a lot of cash being put into businesses, or what appear to be businesses. But in most parts of the world the regulators are still forming their views on the best way to approach this whole new class of businesses and investments. Which means it is still a bit of a wild west. That is not to say everyone is a cowboy, far from it. There are some very serious players out there, and some brilliant ideas backed by genuine and capable teams.

I started to look at the investment that have taken place this year. There is no definitive source, because the markets are unregulated. There are plenty of listing sites that give information about planned ICO, and they will give a rating on the business. But companies often have to pay to be listed, or may get a free listing but with opportunities to enhance that listing through payment.

Data published on https://www.coinschedule.com/stats.html recently showed 166 ICOs from first 3 months of 2018. That is the graphic at the top, showing the money raised through those 166 ICO campaigns. It is hard to get a feel for that many, so I have tried to break it down and look at the different shape of the charts, starting with the top 5:

Even stripping out the noise of the 'bottom' 161 the chart is still massively dominated by Telegram. So next I look at the other end, which in the headline graphic they disappear into nothing, but when you look just at those that raided less than $2m, it looks like this:

That's eleven ICOs, and I added the running average line through them, showing there is fairly steep difference at this end of the overall chart as well. Then I took the upper middle section:

You can see the flattening off in that middle section. But it still isn't a clear picture, so next I did a tally of the numbers of companies raising more than $100m, $40m-$99.9m and then in three $10m groups, and the bottom two groups of up to $5m and $5 to $10.

It should be a histogram, but let's not get technical on this, I just wanted to illustrate the shape of the ICOs. Better is this one, if I make the class sizes even, except for the $100m+ which gives a little blip at teh start of the chart, but to me, this gives the best view of the shape of ICOs:

Two point to note:

1. I included the telegram data for Telegram pre-sale 1 only, if I included the full $1.7billion, you can not see anything in relation to that!

2. I have not included any data for the checkitsreal ICO as that only went live on 6th April. See details here: www.checkitsreal.io