2019 has witnessed very low funding with respect to initial coin offerings even though the month of March saw significant increase in the amount raised from ICOs.
March funding reached a temporary peak of $49 million which is a significant increase from the $22 million raised in February which shows that the sector is picking up contrary to the reports from some Wall Street analysts who concluded months ago that the token sales is dead.
Change in Fortune
The view expressed by the analysts was premised on the fact that the Q1 of 2019 witnessed mere $118 million raised through ICOs. Considering that at its peak token sales were generating such funding in hours, the Wall Street analysts’ views may be excused.
At the golden stage of the funding system in 2018, initial coin offerings generated $7.8 billion. The March figure even though a marked increase from the February’s cannot be termed recovery yet since the crypto industry is still struggling in a correction that has lasted many months.
Skeptical Investors
With the price of Bitcoin pushing upwards towards $5000, it could be the end of the so-called crypto winter with attendant boom in funding even though investors have shown skepticism towards initial coin offerings.
The positive fall-out from the struggles that the sector experienced could be drawn from the fact that established businesses such as exchanges are beginning to get involved in ICO management through the setting up of ICO hosting platforms as seen recently with Binance and Huobi.
This has become necessary considering that more than 80 percent of past funds raised for startups could not be accounted for because the projects failed or were set up by scammers.
The controversy over ICOs was reignited by the crypto critic Nouriel Roubini when he stated on April 1 that startups setup through initial coin offerings are inferior to those that used more traditional funding methods to set up their businesses.
ICO Success Stories
Despite the misgivings, there is no doubt there has been some successes such as Tron and EOS, platforms that have become forces to reckon with in terms of digital assets and have even become dApp building platforms on which new digital companies are building their businesses on.
Some industry analysts are looking up to security tokens as the solution to the legitimacy gap that seems to exist with tokens that have mostly been classified as unregistered securities in the past by regulators such as SEC.
