The ICO market is continuing to sizzle this summer with new coins entering the market almost everyday. With so much activity, it can be difficult to keep things in perspective. What constitutes a large initial coin offering, and what’s small peanuts? Our new visualization makes things very simple.
We got the data for our visualization over at coindesk. We placed the total value of each initial coin offering into a color-coded and clustered bubble chart. We included the logo or name of each coin and the initial valuation (if size permitted), creating a quick snapshot of the ICO market today. For visualization purposes we only looked at ICOs worth more than $20M.
Top 10 Biggest ICOs in 2018
1. Telegram: $1.7B
2. Dragon: $320M
3. Huobi: $300M
4. Bankera: $150.9M
5. Orbs: $118M
6. Envion: $100M
7. Flashmoni: $72M
8. Neuromation: $71.7M
9. Elastos : $70M
10. Zeepin : $61M
Our visualization makes two points clear about the ICO market right now: only a couple are big in size, but there are dozens of opportunities to be had. First off, it puts Telegram’s monster $1.7B ICO into perspective. It was bigger than all the other top ten ICOs combined. And in fact, there is a similar inequality further down our list. Only 2 other ICOs broke $300M, and an additional 3 broke $100M. This suggests that ICOs struggle to break through the $100M threshold.
Second, the pace of cryptocurrency innovation is quite staggering. Consider for example the cumulative value of ICOs over the last five years. This trend manifests itself in the form of several low-value ICOs largely only known inside the cryptocurrency community. We set a floor for our visualization to only include ICOs worth $20M or more, which left us with 115 bubbles in our chart. That means we excluded 219 other ICOs from this year alone worth less than $20M but still tracked by coindesk. That’s about 2 new ICOs every single day this year.
The speed at which the market is changing can make it hard to know which cryptocurrencies deserve attention. This in turn creates an opening for things like cryptocurrency index funds. It also makes the market vulnerable to bad actors. A new study also found that the market is susceptible to scams, although investors don’t seem to be too concerned. A rapidly changing market also means that many ICOs burn out, leaving over 800 dead coins.
To a certain extent, all these things make sense for a brand new market experiencing growing pains, especially one with low barriers to entry and relatively little regulation. What do you think will happen in the second half of 2018? Will a new ICO unseat Telegram at the top of our list? Let us know at press@howmuch.net.