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ICO's fundraising is still strong despite the increased attention of regulatory agencies and the saturation of the market. However, compared to an average venture capital investment (even taking into account the bias due to the nature of our dataset), the amount raised is quite high.

This could easily be explained. Not only do a lot of investors come from the crypto world, with their understanding (or self-confidence) deep enough to invest in Blockchain-related projects with more anticipation, but with "that's the new Ethereum / Bitcoin "being a recurring theme in project sites. All market participants were more enthusiastic about investing in "new economy" projects rather than "traditional" projects, often without any apparent need for cryptocurrence / technology. Blockchain. With regard to fintech projects, this field has become quite naturally the first test field of blockchain capability for real world problems.

According to a research by The BB Fund, based on tokendata.io data, more than $ 5.3 bln was raised via ICO in 2017 with $ 5.1 billion drawn in the last nine months. There were 1,331 analyzes and only projects with more than $ 1 million were considered.

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According to the research, 60 percent of ICOs have been profitable up to the end of the year. now: the median return is 2x

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The categorization is enough subjective and organized as follows:

The "Blockchain" category represents all projects related to Blockchain infrastructures.

"Cards & Payments" represents a very broad category of projects, from payment processors serving merchants to crypto portfolios with integrated p2p transfers and other functions.

"Decentralized Market" is composed of projects, which usually rely on their description on a familiar "Decentralized XYZ" cliché – ranging from service contracts (shipping, logistics, taxis) to property markets (real estate, electricity) and universal markets, targeting any type of good / service imaginable.

While the majority of these projects do not benefit from Blockchain, implement things already implemented and suffer from lack of resources, some of them seem interesting and could survive and prosper.

The "Crypto Market" category includes any type of exchange vehicle or "exchange" type dedicated to crypto.

"ICO platform" can refer not only to such platforms but also to accelerators, start-up clubs and any type of project that claims to develop an ecosystem. enthusiastic investors, teams and crypto.

"Identity Verification" and "Advertising" are also broad categories, the first of which includes projects with a focus on auditing Identity of people to the identity of food products and contents. The second segment includes everything related to advertising – lead generation, promotion, network brand influencers.

Among other categories, we would like to specifically mention the so-called "commodity" companies. This term, again, does not always mean a common sense commodity (gold or zinc oxide), but also any real tangible good, which is used as a kind of collateral or can be treated as such. ]

This breakdown not only reflects a greater interest in Blockchain infrastructure / fintech projects but also higher development costs due to the larger workload (Blockchain), licenses and integration costs (fintech). While valuations and attracted investments are rarely justified, investors have been more willing to allocate larger amounts to projects with high investment costs.

Similarly, we have seen the painful trend of projects of lower quality. , with apparently no diversification and original ideas behind them in many cases.

The OIC market may be difficult to predict sometimes

A system of simultaneous linear equations describes the price dynamics of crypto assets, which they There are more "traditional" coins or tokens newly issued by the ICO. While the aggregate demand for cryptographic assets is defined by endogenous factors (mainly news, investor sentiment and the manipulation of "whales"), this is the main factor defining the value of all crypto-markets

Quite familiar with a concept of correlation, you might already have noticed that most assets generally move in the same direction, each time except for a few. This is a very familiar phenomenon for stock market investors, especially for those who are involved in asset trading in markets with high political turbulence, for example. You could easily find the dependency between the volume of money the OIC raised in a given month and the price of ETH (which are assets that influence each other) – because The interdependence of Bitcoin and Ethereum prices is also very characteristic.

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However, in the case of the ICOs, it is difficult now to be able to do so. attract long-term investors by promising them to come back for a while in the future – there should be a plan from the startups side to get to this future as quickly as possible at a steady pace.

While Blockchain, ICOs, atomized economy brings technologies and completely new business models to the world, the principles of investment and the fundamentals remain the same: the long term game, responding to the actual demand of the market,

Recently, Vitalik Buterin wrote:

"All crypto communities […] must make the difference between getting hundreds of billions of dollars of digital paper wealth. "

The ICO market offers many opportunities for speculation and quick profits, particularly through discounts and pre-sale bonuses to an early stage, and only a few players are willing to play long-term.Your investment philosophy should be based specifically on a long-term strategy.The strategy is to develop technologies in emerging and unbanked markets (Asia, Africa, Latin America), to implement infrastructures to activate and / or disrupt traditional systems (including bank models as a service and banking principles) opened). Crypto and the traditional financial worlds, including the implementation of the Blockchain by government agencies.

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The ICO Market as a fund-raising way – promising projects as well as crooks

Up to now, we have been able to observe several moves from the industry side, its main players prompted and welcomed. They could allow Blockchain-related technologies and businesses to break through and investors to make profits. Not only the commodity sector, but also some advertising, payment and lending companies are making their way into the respective industries with the leverage of an ICO. Such as ETHLend (loan), Ripio (microcredit), UTRUST (crypto payment gateway), BitClave (smart advertising and promotion) and NVB (native video advertising via vlogs and content discovery platform), to name a few recent examples.

For many of these companies, contracts and smart tokens are the only nuisance and it is highly doubtful that they would use Blockchain technology (or be content with anything absolutely decentralized).

Fund investors, family funds, banks and investment companies start investing in projects related to Blockchain or Bitcoin funds. Whatever it is, it does not really matter, because liquidity flows very fast compared to many other ecosystems. USV, Y Combinator, Capital Capital, Lux Capital, Winklevoss Capital, Jefferson River Capital LLC and Forsters LLP, Citi, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Thomson Reuters, BoA, HSBC, Temasek Holdings, etc. – it is difficult to name all the family offices, venture capital funds and banks, which invest in companies developing Blockchain and crypto technologies.

While for those who raised small amounts easily convertible via the fraudulent behavior and negligence of ICO, punishable by law), the major players are forced to look for new ways of monetizing, products and models, who could pay for all this (rather expensive). The largest could probably become investors themselves (which would be bad for current token holders, but not so bad for the entire ecosystem), looking for projects to outsource the task of making profits. It may sound crazy, but with so much money at stake and their future earnings often being tied to the power of buying their own brands, companies are forced to look for ways to create wealth like never before .