Digital Currency Sales Nearly Double Last Year’s Five Months In

Digital currency sales reached $13.7 billion for the first five months of 2018, which is close to double the sales from last year.

Reuters, citing research from Strategy&, the unit of PwC and Crypto Valley Association, reported that virtual currency sales from 537 initial coin offerings surpassed the $7 billion raised last year and includes ICOs from Telegram, which is a messaging service. Telegram raised $1.7 billion without selling tokens to the public, while EOS, an infrastructure project for decentralized apps, raised higher than $4 billion in an ICO that started in the middle of 2017 and lasted a year, noted the report.  Over the 3,470 ICOs launched since 2013, the data shows that only 30 percent have completed the fundraising successfully, noted Reuters. Many of the ICOs have either been delayed or didn’t take off as hoped.

Of the countries to host ICOs, the report found that the U.S. is still the leader, with 56 token sales raising $1.1 billion taking place during the first five months of this year. In Europe, Switzerland remained the ICO capital — but the U.K. is gaining ground with 48 ICOs registered in the country, raising $507 million so far in 2018.

Of the initial coin offerings that blasted onto the scene in 2017 — along with the price of bitcoin, 46 percent have failed. That’s according to an Engadget report from earlier in the year which — citing data from TokenData — found that of the 902 ICOs in 2017, 46 percent have failed. Among that percentage, 142 never got the funding and another 276 have faded away or were scams. What’s more, the report noted that another 113 ICOs have stopped talking about their project online or haven’t had enough adopters that success will be likely. Of the survivors, the report noted that only a few have raised more than $10 million via an ICO. According to Engadget, excluding the ICOs that were outright scams, it’s not surprising that many of the ICOs and the virtual coins failed to take off. Many were focused on niches such as dentistry or trucking, while others were riding the coattails of other successful tokens and thus didn’t stand out enough to get traction. The report noted that ICOs remain popular this year, but there’s no guarantee that they will have a better go at it.