2017 was a great year for Bitcoin (BTC). In fact, according to data from CryptoCompare, the price rose from just under $1000 to almost $20,000 during last year. The story has been quite different, though, in the first half of 2018. In fact, on Thursday (21 June 2018), CNBC’s Fast Money show said that Bitcoin seemed to be stuck in purgatory, and that ICOs which had a great 2017 seem to be still going strong. 

According to CNBC’s Bob Pisani, ICOs are still coming out at a “pretty torrid” pace:

“There have been as many ICOs in the first six months of 2018 as there were in almost all of 2017 put together, 334 so far this year vs. 343 for the entire 2017… More money has been raised [so far] this year than all of 2017, and that's the important number.”

Bob Pisani, CNBC

He then went on to give a couple of examples of the “wacky” ICOs we have seen this year. 

The first example he gave was the royalty-backed ICO, TaTaTu, which plans to build a token-powered video-on-demand platform as a competitor to Netflix; it has raised $575 from a private sale of its TTU tokens, with one investor alone, Lady Monika Barardi (co-founder of AMBI Pictures), accounting for around $100 million of that amount. The other famous backer of this project is apprently Prince Félix of Luxembourg (second in line to the throne).

The second example was AKoin Ecosystem, a new project founded by R&B singer Akon that is being launched in around two weeks. Its website says that this project “offers an abundance of digital and in-real-life platforms and experiences that create opportunity and inclusion for youth entrepreneurs by allowing consumers to buy, hold, and spend cryptocurrency right from their smartphone through a suite of blockchain-powered apps.” The token that will be powering this ecosystem is called AKoin, which aims to be a “stable currency alternative throughout Africa.” As reported here, as part of this project, a 100% crypto-based city (that uses AKoin tokens for payment) is being built in Senegal, a country in West Africa. 

The last example Pisani gave was Filecoin, a blockchain-based cloud storage project, which launched in August 2017 and has so far raised over $250 million, but still does not have an actual working product.

However, Pisani says that he is hearing that “a lot of investors are growing weary of the valuations.” 

Pisani colleague, Brian Kelly, agrees, saying that investors are in a “wait-and-see mode” right now:

“Everybody is saying 'Show me… we gave you a ton of money, show me the product, I want to see this thing come out'; Also, everybody and their brother is coming to me and saying 'How do we do an ICO' or pitching me an ICO. So, you have a massive amount of supply… It feels very much like Bitcoin did in December, where we have sky high valuations, it's very frothy, and people are starting to say 'I am going to put the brake on the ICOs right now. I've got my portfolio. I don't need a seventh or an eighth ICO'.”

Brian Kelly, CNBC

When asked what is happening with Ether (ETH), Kelly said that what’s really interesting is that, unlike last year, a lot of these ICOs, this year, have been funded with fiat (USD) and not Ether, and that a lot of the investors, whom are based in Asia, seem to have started looking away from the ICOs and getting into Bitcoin, Ether, and the big DApp platforms.

 

Featured Image Credit: Photo by “Fernando Arcos” via Pexels; licensed under “CC0”