As seen above, beginning of January through the end of February saw a decrease in the number of ICOs being conducted. However, these project showed increasing average funds being raised so far. Essentially this indicates that few ICOs stole the show and closed bigger deal sizes while the number of smaller ICOs decreased.

This trend has been broken….

In March, we saw more ICOs that raised less on average. The total amount of funds raised in March also decreased significantly. This is most likely explained due to the adverse market conditions (bearish market sentiment), as the ICO market is strongly correlated with the overall crypto market, represented by the price of Bitcoin in the chart below.

Return on Investment

Let’s take a look how profitable investing in ICOs actually is and how it changed during the past 15 months.

The chart above gives the impression that investing in ICOs is getting increasingly unprofitable. However, this chart has to be taken with a grain of salt. This is mainly because investments, such as bottles of wine, get better over time by their very nature. (A 10-year investment yields on average higher returns than a 1-month investment.) So even though, the 1 USD invested in an ICO in January 2018 might still only be worth 1.05 USD today, this might change a year down the line. So the chart above is basically comparing apples and oranges. And yes, this was the last food analogy for this piece.

To get a clearer picture of the average historical performance of ICO investments we need to include the time factor into the equation. The chart above shows the classic definition of returns on invesments which is:

We now adjust this equation by taking the n-th square root of the ROI, with n being the average time since the ICO has ended. In our calculation we used months since the close of the tokensale.