ICO market down 97% as investors turn to IEOs: BitMEX research

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The initial coin offering (ICO) market is having a very bad year, a new report has revealed. The report by crypto trading platform BitMEX indicated that in Q1 this year, ICOs managed to raise just $40 million, down 97 percent from a similar period in 2018.

Investors have fled the ICO market, perhaps due to the poor performance of most of the projects that have raised funds in ICOs. According to the report, many of the projects are down at least 80 percent from the ICO price. Some of the projects are not even trading at all.

EOS was the biggest ICO of 2018, the report confirmed. The project raised $4.2 billion in what is still the largest ICO to date. However, it has a negative return based on average ICO price of 4 percent. Telegram was second, having held the record prior to the EOS ICO with $1.7 billion raised. Telegram’s token is yet to be listed, with its blockchain platform only having launched in beta just a month ago. These two ICOs set themselves apart from the rest in terms of funds raised.

Dfinity, Bankera, t0, Basis, PumaPay, Orbs, Jet8 and Unikoin Gold were the other major ICOs. Dfinity and t0 are yet to be listed, with Basis having returned capital to investors. Basis, a stablecoin startup, had raised $133 million but the legal contracts it signed with investors demanded that it refunded them if it failed to launch its stablecoin. The other four major ICO projects have all registered negative returns based on ICO prices, ranging from 64 percent with Orbs to a shocking 99 percent with Jet8.

With the slowdown in ICOs, investors have “changed the C to an E.” Initial exchange offerings have been the new wave, filling the void left by the ICOs. Binance has dominated the IEO market, with its Launchpad platform seeing some of the most successful IEOs to date. They include Gifto, Fetch.AI, BitTorrent, Celer and Matic. Huobi is second with two IEOs, with the other players being Bittrex, OKEx, KuCoin and BitMax.

Unlike with ICOs, IEOs have registered positive returns. Blockcloud, a decentralized TCP/IP platform which launched on OKEx, leads the way with a 600 percent return in relation to the IEO price. BitTorrent with 433 percent, TOP with 357 percent, Fetch.AI with 203 percent and Newton with 197 percent are the other standout returns.