When it comes to estimating the amount of investments in the Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) in the past four years, the team from elementus.io found a lot of discrepancies. Different information providers published estimates varying from 3.5 to 4.5 billion US dollars.
According to Max Galca from elementus.io, the primary source of information are the reports issued by the ICOs. These sources proved to be not entirely confident and this is why it was necessary to revise each ICO and each blockchain, including only ICOs that raised more than 100,000 dollars.
This led the team behind the research to some interesting results. They noticed the ICOs have been having an increasing rate since January last year. Moreover, the ICOs in the last three months surpassed the total of all the ICOs realized until September this year.
In May 2016, the total amount of raised funds was below 100 million dollars and this rhythm maintained until April this year. After April, we can see three jumps to over one billion dollars – in July, October and November 2017. Despite some pessimist opinions, it looks like the ICOs are in big expansion.
The final results of this detailed research reveal that 6.3 billion US dollars was invested in the Initial Coin Offerings in the past four years. In November of this year 148 ICOs took place, making it a record month in terms of number of ICOs realized in one month. The largest amount of funds raised took place in October this year when 1.39 billion dollars was raised, as opposed to November in which 1.38 billion dollars was collected by different ICOs.
This leads to the conclusion that this year is the year of massive adoption of the ICO concept as a way to raise funds. Even entities outside the cryptocurrency ecosystem, such as some companies linked to Disney, used ICOs to raise funds.
