The initial coin offering frenzy took over a young and inexperienced crypto market in 2017. People were putting in a large amount of money in projects that had no legal, banking or regulatory approvals. Releasing a mere whitepaper and a website could ensure entrepreneurs easy access to capital. But whether they would release their product – or not – remained a different mystery altogether.
Big Bucks for Blockchain Startups
Since the ICO boom, Forbes reported, over 800 blockchain projects have raised around $20 billion via the sale of their bitcoin-like own tokens. But how much of this money has survived or have been put to use has little-to-no evidence. MobileGo, for instance, raised a whopping $53 million in tokenized crowdfunding to build a video betting and e-sport platform. The project has reportedly removed the cryptocurrency aspects from its nucleus altogether. And the project founders, Sergey and Maxim Sholom, have not conducted any independent audit yet to show where the $53 million has gone.
Losses incurred from the projects like MobileGo somewhat equal many small ICO projects that have abandoned their development plans. According to Deadcoins, a website that indexes non-functional coins, there are over 1,000 ICOs that have already bitten the dust. Though not all the projects were failures. Many among the listed projects, including Enigma and CoinDash, reported hacks, while others like Onecoin or Paycoin were outright scams.
But, there are still a few ICOs that have survived the day and are developing their blockchain projects actively. Moreover, the return on investments out of these projects have outperformed expectations, validating that not all is bad in the world of cryptos and ICOs.
The NXT project came before the ICO boom. Launched in 2013 by an anonymous developer, the blockchain project held the sale of its NXT tokens in September 2013 to develop a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. It managed to raise about $16,800 worth of Bitcoin at a per NXT value of $0.0000168. The NXT/USD rate at the time of this writing is $0.064521, according to CoinMarketCap.com. That marks a 383953.58 percent return off each NXT token.
NXT also stuck to its path to developing a blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform, eventually building an active community of developers. In light to the recent developments in the public ledger space, NXT has the potential to deliver, which can be confirmed by its sustainability in the market.
The project that kick-started the ICO frenzy in the first place, Ethereum started a new wave of decentralized applications and smart contract developments on the top its open-source distributed ledger platform. The project had its ICO round in mid-2o14, in which it raised $16 millions after selling 11.9 million Ether tokens at a price of $0.311 per unit. At press time, the same token costs around $200. That is 64,209 percent more than the initial value.
Many other ICO projects that survived the FUD with active development and impeccable accountability include NEO, a digital asset ownership platform originally known as Antshares, Spectrecoin, a privacy-centric digital currency network, and Stratis, an enterprise-grade BaaS platform. Ark, Stroj, Lisk, EOS, and the list continues.
The key takeaway is that the projects that vastly focus on offering BaaS, privacy, and decentralization fared better. The ICO industry, as a whole, is surviving with the survival of good projects.
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