80% of ICOs in 2017 Were Only Scams, Studies Show

The Statis Group, an advisory for ICOs or Initial Coin Offerings, has recently published a report that claims that almost a whopping 80% of ICOs that we saw in 2017, were actually fake. The firm has reached this conclusion by studying the life cycles of the ICOs introduced in 2017.

However, a silver lining to this upsetting statistic is that although 80% of the total ICOs turned out to be scams, around 70% of the funding found healthy channels as the money went on to back higher quality projects. Around 4% of the ICOs turned into failures and 3% died out, which means that they were not listed by exchanges for trading for three consecutive months.

2017 had seen a total investment of $11.9 billion in coins and tokens and just about 11% of that went on to back ICOs that were actually scams, with large scam-projects like Arisebank, Pincoin and Savedroid receiving the bulk of this 11%. Smaller scam projects received almost negligible funding vis-à-vis the market as a whole. In the beginning of July, we had also come across a report from TechCrunch which revealed that over a thousand crypto firms and projects had perished by the end of June, 2018.

These weren’t the only instances of bad times that seem to have gripped the digital currency scene. Cyber security firm Carbon Black has also pointed out the theft of a total value of approximately $1.1 billion in the first half of 2018 itself, with the dark web making it easier for cybercriminals to act. However, the picture is not entirely grim. PwC and the Swiss Crypto Valley Association have jointly announced that ICOs have seen burgeoning volumes between January and May 2018 and the values have already surpassed the total amount of 2017.