ICO market trends: ICObazaar reports projects reliability raise in 2018

3000+ ICOs data analysed in May’18 by one of top listing platforms ICO Bazaar. $945 mln raised with US, UK and Russia leading. Finance and payment platforms dominate investors’ choice and ICOs become more transparent to reach out.

Market overview

The ICO market in 2018 is rapidly growing. After high surge in activity in March, the market showed a decline in raised funds in April and May, primarily due to the lower number of projects entering the market (a vast part of ICO projects are preparing the ICO launch in the fall).

Source: coinschedule.com

March 2018 was the most successful month of 2018 so far, both in ICO number growth and in amount raised. An incredible historical revenue surge in March was influenced by the results of the Venezuelan national cryptocurrency El Petro ($5 billion raised) and Telegram ($1.8 billion raised).

Most productive countries

If we compare the results country by country, we’ll see that the US still accounts for the largest segment of ICO market by the number of projects launched. Second place goes to Great Britain, and Russia is taking the third place. Data analysis by funds raised shows Russia leading with almost $1 billion.

Source: icowatchlist.com

Most popular categories

If we look at categories, the largest sector by number of ICOs would be Finance (13%), then goes Payments/Wallets (6.6%), third one is Commerce/Retail (6.3%).

Source: icowatchlist.com

The image is quite different when we compare tokensale results by funds raised. The first place goes to Blockchain Platforms (38%), the second — Network/Communications (16,6%), and Finance (9,5%) is only the third.

Source: icowatchlist.com

Closed token sales by month according to ICObazaar data

Source: ICObazaar.com

The amount of projects active in Jan-May 2018 already surpassed the entire previous year by 2 times. Monthly result for active ICOs in May 2018 is 26 times higher than that in May 2017. Most crowdsale expectations lie above $1 million (83.4%) and only 16% plan to raise less than $1 million. Almost 30% of the ICOs are planning to get more than $10 million.

ICObazaar rating system — scam will not pass

In 2018 our experts rated above 4.5 out of 5 only 7% of all projects listed. More often they get less than a 4 (58%). The main reason why an ICO gets low rating is a lack of information about the company and it’s team, as well as an unsatisfactory description of the product in the Whitepaper. This usually happens when the team hurries to get listed on ICO trackers but doesn’t pay enough attention to their documentation, social media or the size and quality of community supporting the project.

Source: ICObazaar.com

However, if we look at the rating distribution in 2017, the share of projects with rating lower than 4 was even higher with predominant portion of projects with 3–3.4 score. Hence, we can conclude that the share of high-quality projects increases. At the same time the amount of projects with low rating (below 2.4) showed a minor decrease: 6% in 2018 vs. 7% in 2017.

This means that projects have become more serious about PR, marketing and its’ reputation. Investors, in return, have begun to pay more attention to the reliability and transparency of information provided by ICOs.

Source: ICObazaar.com

What to expect

We expect further reduction in the number of ICOs in June and July and a gradual increase starting from August. In summer, trends will continue to prevail for financial projects, as well as projects that develop their payment services and platforms.

Top-10 public ICOs ended in May 2018

Source: ICObazaar.com, icodata.io