42 Days of ICO Madness in Telegram Data
Earlier this year, I started a website called ICOWhitelists.com.
The background for this decision can be boiled down to 3 things happening:
1: Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) had started seriously disrupting VC funding.
2: A handful of my friends just would not stop talking about Ethereum and Vitalik Buterin.
And 3: There was an insane amount of noise on the internet about ICOs, making it really hard to know where to focus. This pretty much sums up my first impression of ICOs:
After doing some research, I did however find projects that made sense. In many cases, though, these projects had closed their whitelists. So I started ICOWhitelists.com to scratch my own itch — to never miss out on a great ICO.
I started by writing a few simple articles about ICOs. Most of these later turned out to be quite successful from an investment perspective. Quantstamp, Ripio Credit Network, and Raiden Network are some examples that gave a solid return-on-investment for backers.
I interviewed ICO investor Ian Balina, in a post with zero images and tons of words (I’m still learning). Ian generously shared his experience and insight, which our readers appreciated.
The one thing people have engaged with the most however, is the Telegram Tracker.
Enter the Telegram Tracker
Telegram is a widely used means of communication between ICO teams and their communities. Hence, we can use Telegram group sizes as an indicator for measuring the strength of an ICO community.
The Telegram Tracker monitors the number of members in Telegram groups every 15 minutes. This lets us see which Telegram groups are growing fastest. Here’s an example from November 26th:
After monitoring these groups for some time, we can then look at trends, and see how Telegram growth correlated with things like price. Here’s an example for Power Ledger:
As you can see, people tend to follow the money (not the other way around).
If we look at all 150+ groups we track over time, we see some interesting shapes showing up:
If you’ve been following crypto the last few weeks, you’ll recognize events here including the Bitcoin Cash breakout, the Quantstamp ICO, and Power Ledger’s bull run. I took WAX out of the graph since it exploded the scale (!).
If we take a step back, the Telegram Tracker is an example of something that I believe is understated in the field of ICOs. While VC funding mostly happens behind closed doors, ICOs are open to the world. The consequence is that we get a chance to collect data on these projects (and their communities) from a very early stage.
In 2018, I’m certain we’ll see a strong push towards use of data and analytics for ICOs. Ultimately this will increase transparency and liquidity, and hence it will benefit the ICO model as a whole.
If you found this post interesting, please click “clap” so people in your network will see it. Thanks for reading!
To see which Telegram groups are winning right now, you can visit the Telegram Tracker on ICOWhitelists.com.
