At $6.3 Billion, ICO Funding in Q1 2018 Has Already Surpassed All of 2017

Data collected by CoinDesk has revealed that ICOs collectively raised more money in the first three months of 2018 than they did throughout all of 2017.

So far, ICOs have pulled in more than $6.3 billion, which is equivalent to 118% of total ICO funds raised last year.

A dip in ICO funding in the month of November 2017 caused voices inside and outside of the cryptocurrency community to cry that the ‘era of ICOs’ was coming to an end. However, the month of December presented a new high–$1.44 billion was raised. Then, in January, $1.79 billion; in February, $2.38 billion. The month of March saw another dip, bringing $2.15 billion–an impressive figure nonetheless.

The data also shows that the market is changing in another way. According to CoinDesk, “both the size of the average funding round and the rate of project funding are higher than ever. The first quarter saw 59 percent as many ICOs as in all of 2017 receive capital.”

The Stories in the Data

It’s also important to take the massive Telegram ICO into account–bringing in over $1.7 billion, the token sale has made headlines as the largest in history.

CoinDesk notes that even without Telegram, ICOs in the first quarter of 2018 have brought in $4.6 billion, which is only 15 percent less than the total funds raised in 2017.

So far, 200 token sales have taken place in 2018 (there were 343 that token place in all of 2017). Most of them have netted less than $100 million.

The ICO business has always been risky for investors. Nowadays, however, the risk is growing for entities that choose to hold ICOs. The United States SEC has cracked down on several token sales, including Munchee and AriseBank. Munchee’s ICO was halted to due a failure to register tokens as securities; AriseBank was deemed a ‘scam.’