The first blood

Nonetheless, despite its uniqueness and novelty, the crypto market didn’t become something new for the speculators. As any growing market, cryptocurrencies have got a lot of fakes, variations, and third-party solutions. This may be compared to the smartphone market, where there are a few main players and a ton of much cheaper Chinese producers. The market, which embraced both people with faith in the bright future of decentralization, and speculators, aimed only at gaining profits by any means.

By coincidence, ICO campaigns became an instrument of manipulation. Some people have seen there an instrument of supporting the projects, their development, and, surely, multiplying the personal finances, while others decided to simply play on this and get money. As a result, now we have lots of projects, stolen user money, and only a few successful cases. But the main thing you should keep an eye at in this situation is the key market players: individuals (more known as hamsters) and speculators. Institutional players are now aside, as the market is to small and not interesting for them.

Is it the time for a change?

On the last crypto conferences, I started to note that the ideas of speeches move to the need for regulation and creation of strict rules for cryptocurrencies and ICOs. In the begging of this year, everyone was talking about some kind of regulation, but in every way tried to put their tokens into the utility zone, but now everyone speaks only about STO (Security Token Offering).

It can be considered as a natural development of the market, but if you pay attention to the conference speakers, they are mainly made of institutional and VC markets, together with politicians and government affiliates. The market regulation is mainly anticipated by this companies for insuring their own risks. However, with the loud statements about securing the users from scam projects, nobody speaks about securing the users investing their $500 into a project for income. Who is speaking about the need for regulation then? Real cryptocurrency users, who have already got their fingers burnt and make their conclusions, or those who want to gain income from the market, but only if it is framed by law, to minimize risks? While we think about that, the marked started its turn towards the regulation.

Where do the ICO investments come from now?

The best way to understand the market is by reading numbers, but it is quite hard to notice on the sidelines. Let’s take a look at the crypto market in general first.