The median fundraise in initial coin offerings (ICOs) has been on a steady march downward since its peak in the heady days of the second quarter. In the fourth quarter, even the high-profile Science Blockchain (12.2 million USD) failed to come near its hard cap. Chatter at cryptocurrency conferences points to a more cautious investor base. But the truth is, crypto is starting to resemble the world wage economy: tokens that can command large fundraises are rolling in on bigger and bigger waves of money, while the bottom tier bounces along and the middle tier gets squeezed.

We took the list of ICOs that opened in each quarter, established fundraise amounts for the ones that had closed, and ranked them into three tiers by the amount raised. In Q4 so far, the gap has only gotten wider between top projects by fundraise, like Polkadot (USD 142.4 million) and Liquid (USD 105 million, and projects in the middle, like Dragonchain (USD 13.7 million) and AirSwap (USD 12.6 million).

Meanwhile, the number of projects calling it quits is ballooning. We’re now seeing new projects list at a rate of about five to seven per day. Most of those make it to ICO open, but a growing number of them are shutting down websites and social media, without a successful close. At the end of Q3, we counted 15 canceled out of 241 ICOs opened in the quarter. Since then, 35 more have canceled and 15 of those opened so far in Q4 are already canceled.

Of course, it’s not wise to measure projects’ success by the amount they raise. And in Q4, we’ve already seen a few high-profile projects, like Simple Token (21.6 million USD), come to market with modest fundraising goals. That hasn’t slowed the overall pace: So far this quarter, 133 projects have raised 1.38 billion USD, by our preliminary mid-quarter count, on pace to easily surpass the 1.74 billion USD raised by 133 projects in all of Q3.