https://www.cryptovantage.com/news/heres-what-happened-to-the-biggest-icos-of-all-time/
Bitcoin’s rise to almost $20,000 in late 2017 may have attracted the most mainstream attention for crypto up until now, yet initial coin offerings (ICOs) have also been another big draw for the wider public. By raising over $50 billion to date for a wide variety of startups, they’ve shown that even the smallest projects don’t need to go through big VC firms to generate funding.
Some of the amounts raised by individual ICOs have been staggering, dwarfing the amounts raised in seed capital by non-crypto tech startups. Some of the largest ICOs have even ended up not too far away from some of the biggest initial public offerings (IPOs) of all time.
But what has happened to the ten biggest ICOs to date? Have they succeeded, or have they squandered the money spent on them? As this list will show, while there have been a few notable exceptions, most of the top ten have struggled or fallen into obscurity, where they offer us a reminder to think really long and hard before investing money in a project or coin.
Comfortably taking the top spot, EOS raised a whopping $4.1 billion over the course of a year-long ICO that closed in June 2018. Based on a delegated proof-of-stake (dPoS) blockchain that would reportedly handle thousands of transactions per second, it was billed as an ‘Ethereum killer’ capable of providing the underlying bedrock for new decentralized apps and ecosystems.
Sadly for EOS’ investors, things didn’t quite pan out as advertised. Significant doubts were raised as to EOS’ level of decentralization, with one November 2018 research paper concluding that EOS is “fundamentally similar to a centralized cloud computing architecture without the fundamental components of a blockchain or peer-to-peer network.”
In June 2018, when the EOS mainnet launched, one EOS token was worth $14.64. EOS is now worth about $2.50, representing an 82.9% collapse in price. Usage numbers also remain pretty low compared to Ethereum and Tron, which account for the vast bulk of the DeFi ecosystem.
And if you wanted further confirmation of EOS’ fall from grace, LiquidApps — a second-layer solution intended to improve EOS’ scalability — managed to raise a paltry $2.8 million a 2019 ICO.
Next up is social network/messaging site Telegram, which raised a hefty $1.7 billion in two ICOs ending in March 2018. These were for its Telegram Open Network (TON), which was planned to be a blockchain-based messaging and social network which could also be used for payments.
TON certainly drew lots of attention from the crypto community, but it also drew attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which in October 2019 prohibited its launch in the U.S. and the distribution of tokens sold in the ICOs.
That was pretty much the death of TON. It labored on for several more months, hoping to find some kind of workaround that would involve avoiding the U.S., but in May Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced that TON would never be launched. In June, the SEC ordered Telegram to pay $1.2 billion in refunds to investors in its ICOs, implying that many won’t be getting all of their money back.
Bitfinex is one of the biggest crypto-exchanges in the world. It also has one of the most questionable reputations, given the status of its Tether stablecoin and the question of whether Tether is sufficiently collateralized. Around the end of 2018 and beginning of 2019, it appeared to be beset with a number of financial difficulties, so it decided to launch its own token, LEO.
Unnamed private investors reportedly spent around $1 billion (in Tether, naturally) in a private ICO in May 2019. The LEO token grants holders discounts on Bitfinex trading fees, and was opened to public trading from May 20, 2019. It hit a peak of $1.97 on June 13, 2019, and now trades at around $1.20.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/1c8d95a6-158c-4be0-8d7b-b43c61b5a81a/TCi05m20oWMzhCbcoa6F_OKbz1nTm_jchbdx9NQgKFP13Xe4DevG0PiWULuwz3BB8w9MjKf2u8FMepM5vRY77-_CCqf4brNLi4VVCT6KZwUSqcb4XAekjLZvGohEQROD39HzAApH
Source: CoinGecko