BitMEX research says No loss of Money on Average for Most ICOs Despite Ether Price Decline

By Ravindra Chagetha

BitMEX’s, the cryptocurrency trading platform, new research results published on Monday have shown that the ICO projects have not lost money on average even the crypto market has seen bearish run since its peak in the last year.  The research team joined the project with crypto data cruncher TokenAnalyst to track the ethereum balances of 222 ICOs over time.

When including the unrealized profit and losses, BitMEX says the ICOs still have net gains of $93 million based on an ETH price of $215. The researches team suggest that the data is “somewhat skewed” by the EOS project which raised around 70 per cent of the ETH of all the projects tracked.

According to the team, “It may surprise some that ICOs are still in a net unrealized profit situation, but many of the Ethereum balances were built up before the price rally at the end of 2017.”

The researches were keen to know the amount of ETH raised by the projects and the U.S. dollar value of the gains and losses that arose from the cryptocurrency’s price shifts. The bearish run of ETH did not cause an impact at the projects overall.

The report  states:

“At the macro level, the projects appear to have already sold almost as much Ethereum as they raised (in US$ terms). Of the Ethereum still held by the projects, even at the current c$230 price, projects are still sitting on unrealised gains, rather than losses.”

BitMEX mentioned that the paper shows lower than the actual values as they only looked at ETH balances and did not include funds raised via other tokens.

The falling value of ETH had raised the possibilities among some in the industry of a “downward price spiral” as ICO project included ETH in a large amount. The price drop was feared to raise the likelihood of “panic selling” across projects.

The report shows that he investigated 222 ICOs raised $5.5 billion-worth of ETH in total, and appear to have since sold a very similar amount – producing a total only $11 million less.

According to BitMEX, the projects still hold 3.8 million ETH, around 25 per cent of the tokens originally raised. They further stated:

“However, in US$ terms, these projects have essentially already sold the same amount of Ethereum which they originally raised, leaving them a nice holding of US$830m of Ethereum.”

The researchers concluded the report by stating the major losses as experienced by some projects, the gross losses across projects comes to $311 million.