September ICO Market Overview: Trends, Capitalization, Localization

The ICOmeter aims to provide the accurate and concise information about the development of the ICO market in the previous month, and its relation to the all-time statistics.

In the last 12 months, the ICO market has shown a fluctuating trend, reaching two peaks, both for the number of ICOs and total capital raised: in December 2017 and March 2018.

The number of ICOs launched during the last year is above the value of September 2017, with a trend often diverging from capitalization.

Considering the value of capital raised by ICOs during the last 12 months, after the peak of over $1.7 billion reached in March 2018, a downward trend has been clear since the end of spring 2018 and - in spite of a temporary recovery at the start of the summer - the tendency seems to have accelerated during the last few months, turning back the clock below September 2017's values.

Although the ICO environment is growing to a slower pace, it seems, at least, quite stable referring to some features, such as its distribution in countries which offer some localization advantage, or its focusing on projects referring to the 'core industries' of the blockchain economy.

The geographical distribution of projects which completed their funding process during September 2018 seems to confirm a longer-lasting trend which identifies a leading group composed of the United States, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Russia, Switzerland, and Estonia, which between them contained the headquarters of about 50 percent of the ICOs concluded since 2015.

In September, the top 5 ICOs, in terms of the amount of capital, raised more than 35 percent of the funds invested in this market compared with the previous month when the concentration was over 57 percent, with two of September's largest ICOs obtaining almost 22 percent of the available capital.

The fact that even projects attracting the larger share of funds raised during the month of September closed their ICO far from hitting their anticipated goals, could be seen as proof of the difficulties affecting all companies which base their funding on ICOs to attract investors generating 'hype'.

A comparison with the success rates for September 2017 and September 2018 would confirm the concerns about the present market situation: considering the aggregate value of the soft caps indicated by the ICOs that ended a year ago, the goal set was achieved for 95 percent, while the aggregate hard cap was achieved for 29 percent.

One year after the events are quite different: referring to the ICOs that were concluded in September 2018, the two values dropped, the hard cap goal achievements moved to 64 percent, and the soft cap goal fell to seven percent.