There is nothing hidden between heaven and earth, says the adage; and in the world of cryptocurrencies, where blockchain technology guarantees that all aspects of its occurrence are revealed as in an open book, there is even more transparency: all its record is in sight, at least for a moderately trained eye.
However, when it was decided to quantify the investments in the Initial Coin Offers (ICO, or Initial Coin Offering) in the last four years, the team of elementus.io found a significant discrepancy in the estimates of various suppliers of information. In fact, these were in a range that ranged from $ 3.5 billion to $ 4.5 billion.
The reason for this inaccuracy, says Max Galca in the article "Four years of sales of tokens in a single chart", is that the primary source of investment amounts comes from the reports of those who launch each ICO. This approach did not turn out to be completely reliable, so to estimate the total amount invested since the beginning of 2014, it was necessary to go directly to the source, ICO for ICO, blockchain for blockchain, although limiting itself to those higher than the $ 100K collection.
The graph below shows the growing rate of ICO since January 2016 and how the initial offers of the last 3 months, exceed the total accumulated until September of this year.
In October and November of 2017, ICOs move to the triple-digit zone. Source: elementus.io
The graph of the amount collected per month in the same period is more dramatic, since except May 2016, the collection accumulated remained below 100 million dollars until April of this year, then escalate three times per over one billion dollars - July, October and November 2017. The party of the ICO, despite some pessimistic opinions, is in full heat.
With little boom in the first quarter the ICOs explode from April. Source: elementus.io
The final figure of the capital that the ICOs attracted in four years was, according to the detailed study of elementus.io, of 6.3 billion dollars and with growth prospects. November was revealed as the record month in initial offers of currencies as 148 ICOs closed, although the funds reached their historic high in October - $ 1.39 billion versus $ 1.38 billion for November.
In the 4 years of the ICO's history, there is no doubt that 2017 was positioned as the year of the massive adoption of this collection tool. Not only cryptoecosystem actors financed their projects through this collection method, but even companies linked to Disney used ICO to raise funds.