Andy Bromberg, the co-founder and president of CoinList, a crypto and initial coin offerings (ICOs) “spin-off” of AngelList, has said that all the hype around cryptocurrencies has gone away and he thinks the market is going to stay quiet for awhile.

Indeed, many crypto and blockchain projects have either shut down completely or they’ve been forced to scale back their operations – due primarily to lack of funding.

People Will Be “Focusing On Creating Things”

Commenting on the current state of the crypto industry, Bromberg, a former research scientist at the Stanford Bitcoin Group, told Yahoo Finance in an interview (on January 31st): 

We had this first wave of massive hype around ICOs in 2017, early 2018, and then a little bit of a pullback. And now in 2019, it feels like people are focused on building… I think the market is going to be quiet for a little bit, while people focus on actually creating things. It feels like a little bit of a Mesopotamia, ‘cradle of civilization’ moment, where everyone has the ingredients they need, needs to focus in and start to build out those empires, and create what the future is going to look like, and that’s what this year is going to be about.

Selective Listing Process

As a company that conducts market research on ICOs, CoinList has so far only recommended five crypto token projects on its website. These include:

  • Filecoin – a “blockchain-based cooperative digital storage and data retrieval” protocol,
  • Blockstack – a decentralized “ecosystem that gives users control over their identity, data-ownership, privacy, and security”,
  • Origin – an Ethereum-based platform for “enabling buyers and sellers to interact with each other… without an intermediary (and without fees)”,
  • TrustToken – a “platform fpr creating [tradable] asset-backed tokens”,
  • Props – a “decentralized ecosystem of video applications”.

Notably, none of the crypto projects (listed above) has launched their tokens. Those looking to invest in CoinList’s recommended blockchain platforms must have accredited investor status. In most jurisdictions, an accredited investor must either have a net worth of $1 million (not including value of primary residence) or at least $200,000 in yearly income.

“Compliant” Public Token Sales 

Explaining that there were token sales which were carried out in a compliant manner, Bromberg remarked:

There are regulatory risks, but people have been doing ICOs in what we would consider a compliant way since the beginning of them … Filecoin, Blockstack, some of these really big token sales, they did it treating it like a securities offering, and that’s the compliant way to treat these.

Acknowledging that higher cryptocurrency prices or project valuations are beneficial for the nascent ecosystem, Bromberg pointed out:

Would I love for the price to be higher? Absolutely, it would create a lot more buzz. But in lieu of that, I will take building, I will take results, I will take usage.