80% of Last Year’s ICOs Were Scams, Study Finds

A study recently conducted by Satis cluster has found that in 2017 “over 80 %” of ICOs were scams that cumulatively managed to urge concerning eleven percent of the funds investors poured into the trade. this implies that whereas an outsized range of token sales area unit scams, most of the money still goes to legitimate projects.

The eleven % figure the 30-page document reveals is critical, however the quantity drops to zero.3 % if we tend to stop considering the 3 largest scams that raised funds last year. These were Pincoin, that raised $660 million, Arisebank, that raised $600 million, and Savedroid, that raised $50 million. Their total equals $1.31 billion.

The study known scams as comes that didn’t at first arrange on following their roadmap, or that were deemed by the community as scams. except for these, it found that four % of ICOs didn’t undergo with their plans, and 3 % complete up “dead.”

ICO death, according to Satis, means the project has “not [been] listed on exchanges for mercantilism and has not had a code contribution in Github on a rolling three-month basis from that time in time.”

Per Satis’ analysis “over seventieth of ICO funding (by $ volume) to-date visited higher quality comes.” Associate in Nursing analysis of the over one,500 crypto assets in circulation showed that concerning 0.5 were launched on prime of Associate in Nursing existing blockchain. the foremost widespread platform was Ethereum, launching eighty 6 % of tokens, with Waves following at a pair of.9 percent. modern came third at a pair of.3 percent.

The cluster noted that Ethereum features a range of benefits over different similar platforms, as well as a primary mover advantage, “the entire market share of the ICO discovery part through 2017,” community support, and additional liquidity. The document reads:

“Emerging platforms have been able to differentiate themselves with higher levels of transaction throughput (transactions per second), which generally comes at the cost of higher levels of centralization.”

Elsewhere in its study, Satis conjointly found that the quantity of ICO comes based mostly in countries noted for his or her appealing rules has considerably accumulated. whereas in 2017 most comes were US-based, this year the Cayman Islands dominate each different territory, being chosen by 40 % of comes, up from 3 %.

In the US, the quantity of fundraising comes born from concerning thirty two to ten %. Countries like China and Russia lost their illustration on the charts from 2017 to 2018, presumptively attributable to their approaches to ICOs.

Near the tip of the report Satis Group’s author Sherwin Dowlat hinted additional area unit set to come back within the future, because the organization delves into the “wide variety” of restrictive approaches states throughout the globe area unit selecting.