Is ICO investment still worth it?

[BattleDog]

For the past two months almost all the ICOs i have invested when they get listed on exchange, they are reduced by about 300% of the price i bought it. Those who buy after the ICO tend to gain more profit than we the early adopters. Now am confused whether i should continue with ICO investments or stop. Guys what do you think

[rapheal]

ICO investment is of course still very profitable you only need to buy it when pre sale time or private sale to get bonus up to more than 40% in my opinion it is very profitable.Lets you miss an opportunity to invest in ICO.

[de_prof]

For the past two months almost all the ICOs i have invested when they get listed on exchange, they are reduced by about 300% of the price i bought it. Those who buy after the ICO tend to gain more profit than we the early adopters. Now am confused whether i should continue with ICO investments or stop. Guys what do you think

Yes I think ICO investment is still worth.  It is more profitable.  Many investor prefer to invest in ICO than coin now.

[paolobaltimori]

I think that ICO market has to renew their image and methods... a possible solution to gain trust from investors is to use smart contracts to make automatic withdraw return of funds to investorst if for example roadmap is not developed as required, in this way many scams will simply disappear.

[Volonter]

Considering the situation on the market, it is best to buy tokens that have just hit the exchanges than to invest in ICO.  If the project is real then it will be more efficient!

[MOProgress]

Well there are some ICOs that are still worth investing on although there are so many scam ICOs these days so you have to be careful investing on any ICO now.

[Tiana1]

Ico investments used to be very profitable but now many of them are not worth it anymore. Its better you buy when it gets listed on exchanges because when it gets listed on exchanges, the price is way lower than the price of ico. Very few ICo's with potentials are worth investing in.

[icolumnist]

Here is an article by Jeffrey Tucker is editorial director of the American Institute for Economic Research.

Collectively, ICOs of 2018 have already raised $11,690,981,663 of investments, which is 10 times bigger than the cumulative sum of investments from ICOs of Q1-2 2017. Excluding EOS, the cumulative amount of funding received from ICOs of Q1-2 2018 is 6.4 times bigger than the one of Q1-2 2017.

The total amount raised in the second quarter of 2018 is: $8.4 billion dollars. That doesn’t sound like a dead market to me. It’s true that half the new ICOs in the second quarter were unable to raise more than $100K in funding. But this suggests a downgrade in the quality of listings. That is no surprise to anyone who has watched this sector over several years. A market with virtually no barriers to entry for upstarts is going to attract...well, just about anyone.

It’s for this reason that only 7% of new tokens have managed to obtain listing on established crypto exchanges. But judging by that standard is an extremely high bar. The exchanges are listing thousands of tokens, and even people who obsessively follow this space have to admit that they can no longer keep up with the volume, variety, and frequency of listings.

It’s too much for anyone.

In that same vein, 55% of all ICOS in Q2 2018 failed to complete crowdfunding. But that is only 5% more than the first quarter, and this is in a period of notable pullback in the markets. And also note that there was an 11% increase in the quantity of projects choosing this funding route.

The report further says:

On average, the top projects for Q2 raised 50 million USD. Only 3 mentioned projects attracted all their funds in the course of 1 day. On average, these projects raised their money within 63 days (the average campaign duration time is the same as in Q1, but there is an evident tendency for an increase, at least by 10%). Compared with Q1, the number of projects offering tokens with service characteristics decreased by 24%. The share of projects that offer security tokens decreased by 8%. The number of projects with utility tokens increased by 32%.

What about geography? Despite all the talk of crypto-utopias being set up in far-away lands, North America is still king of the ICO, with 64.7% of all funding attracted. Second is line is the Singapore, then UK, and then Switzerland. Asia showed an increase in funding but a decrease in the number of new projects.

In terms of sheer numbers of business registrations of high-value tokens, the geography is very different: Malta, Gibraltar, and Singapore rank as the top three. “We attribute this to an openness to blockchain projects and the legal changes enacted by financial authorities in Malta and Gibraltar,” says the report.

Keep in mind that all this happened despite true setbacks in the markets as a whole. The median return on tokens in the second quarter was a dismal -55%. The average number of investors per token was 7,871, showing what a truly thin market we are really talking about. The great exceptions to the general pattern were Telegram (a communications platform) and EOS, which sports a new governance model for decentralized applications.

The least successful ICOs were cryptocurrencies. In that sense, Q2 was the quarter of burnout on this asset. We have more than enough monies, markets seem to be saying. The success leaders were service and utility tokens, which is to say protocol assets not designed for monetary exchange but rather assets backed by new services that exist apart from their fundraising potential.

What industries are we talking about? “Following Q1 trends, the most popular industries with the largest number of projects were finance, gaming, and infrastructure. The number of gaming projects doubled compared with Q1.”

In general, the report has vastly more information and detail than any normal person would ever need to evaluate this new sector of financial life. What it all points to is precisely what many of us came to believe in 2017. Something truly spectacular is taking place that could change finance, investment, and entrepreneurial innovation forever.

So why the long faces? It has something to do with the short-term temperament of the investor community as it developed in 2017. This community became addicted to extremely high returns, fast progress, and the belief that everything was changing much sooner rather than later.

History shows a different reality. Railroads in the 19th century had a long and rough start, and the markets were replete with frauds, mishaps, booms and busts, and hence skepticism. The internal combustion engine for tractors took a whole generation to be widely adopted. Internet commerce experienced a spectacular bust in 1999 that traumatized a generation of investors, and we are only now seeing that anti-digital bias fade from people of a certain age.

In the end, crypto markets can’t be about this quarter’s prices, this year’s high-flying coins, or this or that company’s fate. The confidence that one has in crypto traces to a conviction concerning the technology itself and what it can and is doing for the well-being of the human experience.

I head editorial at the American Institute for Economic Research founded in 1933. I've written 8 books and speak regularly worldwide on topics of money, trade, and innovation. Disclosure: yes, I have personal investments in the cryptoasset sector.

Written By

Jeffrey Tucker is editorial director of the American Institute for Economic Research.

[Cryptoz]

The problem may be on your way to find out the potential ICO for your investment. Since there are many scam and failed ICOs, you need to be smarter in analyzing new ICOs. The ICOs are still worth, you just need to be more careful and selective.

[gotbounty]

It will depend on how we make the investment. So far, the coins from ICO always drop drastically after it has been listed ion an exchange. It can drops more than minus 500%. Of course, if you want to get faster profits, ICO is no longer profits, but if you want the long investment method, it is still worth it.

[Alter]

ICO investments will be always worth as long as you know how to choose a good and trust-able projects. I advise to never invest in a new project with unclear information of its team members. You also should analyze that the project will be reasonable on their goals. 

[Hisbullah]

For the past two months almost all the ICOs i have invested when they get listed on exchange, they are reduced by about 300% of the price i bought it. Those who buy after the ICO tend to gain more profit than we the early adopters. Now am confused whether i should continue with ICO investments or stop. Guys what do you think

Of course,  In my opinion ICO investment is still worth.  ICO is more profitable.  I see many investor prefer invest in ICO.  But We must learn the ICO before invest it.

[Quart]

As the name is investment, you should know that investing will take a time to gain profits. ICO tokens or coins need a time to improve their prices on exchanges. The reduction on their prices once listed, is caused by dumping and bear market effects. But don't worry, it should rise someday.

[Bolasodok86]

it is true that many people suffer losses when investing in ico for now, but you should also continue to invest in ico, because I am sure that someday prices can recover.

[Beattysuhita]

By joining and buying coins while still in ico, the advantage is that you can get profit from every ico coin we buy. Especially when the price of coins sold is still very cheap and we can also get a bonus in an amount that can be said to be large, especially when buying in the pre-sale period, almost all of the ico give a bonus of about 50% when still sold. Then when ico is sold and the listing on the market the price can be much higher than the price we bought while still in ico.