In 2017 ICO became a real discovery for investors and entrepreneurs. The total amount of all raised funds for ICOs exceeded $ 4 billion.
According to the statistics on December 1, when the ICO market was measured at relatively modest $ 3.8 billion, European start-ups raised half of these funds, or $ 1.76 billion. And half of the start-ups from Europe were registered in the Swiss Zug with a low level of taxation. In the US, by the beginning of December, there was only $ 1.08 billion, or 28% of the total.
We suggest recalling the five most successful ICOs of the year.
1. EOS
$ 700 million
EOS - the brainchild of an entrepreneur from Hong Kong Brandon Blumer and programmer Dan Larimer. Their company block.one develops software on the Blockchain, which is essentially an operating system for Blockchain applications. The architecture of the project will allow people to make millions of transactions per second, making the Blockchain projects more efficient. Therefore, EOS was called the "killer Ethereum". According to the data of October 2017, the EOS project at that time collected more than $ 700 million for the ICO. Crowdsale is not yet completed, the token sale will continue until the middle of 2018.
2. Hdaq
$ 258 million
Hdaq is the first in the world platform of contract and payment operations IoT (Internet-of-Things) based on Blockchain. The project during December has already attracted $ 258 million with the support of Hyundai. This interest in the startup from the side of a large corporation can be explained: according to forecasts, the potential IOT market is estimated at $ 19 trillion.
3. Tezos
$ 230.5 million
Another "Ethereum killer" - a Blockchain platform of smart contracts started with a record ICO but ended with lawsuits of investors to the organizers of the project. It all started with disagreements within the team, because of it the launch of the next stages of the project was constantly postponed. As a result, at the end of November investors filed the first collective lawsuit with charges of fraud and demand to return the funds. In addition to the immediate founders of the project itself, Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, the defendants in the suit are the organization's Dynamic Ledger Solutions and Tezos Foundation.
4. Filecoin
$ 205 million
The decentralized data storage network Filecoin attracted 205 million US dollars from 2,100 investors from more than 50 countries. This project allows the participants of the Blockchain to provide their servers for secure distributed file storage, receiving a reward for it. In addition, the creators of the project did not sell the tokens themselves, but agreements on future tokens, whose owners are guaranteed to receive tokens in the future: this was a guarantee that investors would sell tokens immediately after the ICO, as it often occurs in projects.
5. Sirin Labs
$ 157.8 million
The project of a secure smartphone on the Blockchain broke into the top ICO at the end of December and immediately hit the fifth line of the completed ICO, pushing out the failed blocking start-up DAO out of the top five. The company Sirin Labs of Israeli businessman Moshe Hogeg and Kazakhstan businessman Kenes Rakishev for several years working on the creation of a secure smartphone, and the Blockchain came just in time. Thanks to a competent marketing company (the famous football player Leo Messi was attracted to the PR project), the project raised $ 121 million in the first five days of the ICO.