2018 has already been an extremely successful year for ICO's, it is reported that total token sales for the first 5 months were $13.7 billion. This includes the mammoth Telegram & EOS ICO's that raised £1.7 billion and $4 billion respectively.

Back in January 2018, the RuffChain team ran an angel investors fund raising round from the 12th to the 16th for their ICO. They followed it up with an early bird round from the 17th to the 20th. Both rounds were for private investors. They did not open a public sale because the team received enough investments in these two rounds to fund their project.

In total they sold 700m RUFF tokens and the team raised approximately 42,500 ETH. On the 20th January, when the early bird sale ended, 1 ETH = $1,167.11. This means that RuffChain raised, in fiat terms, approximately $49,602,175.

Including the 700 million tokens sold, there is 921.8 million tokens in circulating supply with a total supply of 1.84 billion RUFF tokens. The remaining 221.8 million tokens in circulation were distributed as payments for promotions and marketing.

The initial ICO price was $0.06 and after listing on Huobi, Gate.io and Fex it started trading at approximately $0.20 on 29th January.

Since RuffChain listed, the markets have been bearish. We have seen a lot of investors panic sell and exit, the overall market cap fell from $600 billion to $230 billion. This is a loss of $370 billion or 61.67%.

We have also seen something similar happen to RuffChain's token price, it has fallen from $0.20 to $0.05, which is a loss of approximately 75%.

As mentioned earlier, the market is in a terrible condition right now and a lot of the investors that joined during the FOMO period in December/January have now exited. A lot of other ICO's have started since January and this probably took a lot of investments away from RuffChain.

This isn't RuffChain's fault and they have actually done a lot of work since January on both the marketing and development sides of their business.

Development is coming along nicely and so far this year RuffChain has completed its consensus mechanism and this month they have started witness nodes and network testing.

In September this year the team will be releasing their Alpha version with p2p transfer and ledger implementation. This will be their biggest release to date and the team have been working incredibly hard on getting this finished in time, they might even potentially complete ahead of schedule.

The team have also been to lot of conferences over the last couple of months, in particular the CEO, Roy Li, was at Huobi's Blockchain Festival in Vietnam on 25th May, where he delivered a great speech on "The best of both worlds" about Blockchain & IoT.

The alpha release in September and the beta testing in December will be the start of the turn around for RuffChain, I think the project will build up speed and gain the kind of exposure that will help their token grow in value and return to the trading price of $0.20, and hopefully keep rising.

If you would like to learn more about their project, then I suggest checking out the links below:

Website: https://ruffchain.com/

Github: https://github.com/RuffNotes/RuffChain

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RuffChainProject/

Telegram: https://t.me/RuffChain

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ruff_Chain

Highlights of Roy Li's speech at Blockchain Festival (skip to 1:48:00): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0uwg7bb6G0