Inactive, Canceled or No ICO? Project Statuses in Token Clarity
When Token Report first started gathering data on initial coin offerings (ICOs), we predicted there would be a massive growth in the number of projects minting and selling a token before a possible cool down. Now that we are adding new ICOs to our database at a rate of about 7 to 10 a day, we are seeing that the number of projects planning to hold an ICO are not slowing down — and they are raising plenty of money, too.
January 2018 saw a total of 985.9 million USD raised, more than projects raised in both October and November of 2017. However, there’s one key difference: The number of ICOs that are closing is down.
In Token Clarity, our Telegram messaging bot, we currently have four statuses for ICOs listed in our database: Live, Upcoming, Closed and Canceled. As a result of a growing number of “zombie ICOs” — aka dead projects — we have added two more statuses: Inactive and No ICO.
So what are Inactive ICOs? We’re using that status to mark an ICO that is now essentially dead, with no recent activity in sight and last updates from the team going back further than a month ago. In going through our database, we came across several that had planned to open sometime in late 2017 but never made it past that initial announcement — or sometimes, even beginning the sale but fizzling out in the middle of it. Some projects also just never make it further than an initial announcement, going dark before even announcing a crowdsale open date.
The No ICO status would be given to projects that have no intention of either minting a token or holding a sale of tokens to the public. These include: Toastycoin, an interface to burnable payments; Hashgraph, a consensus algorithm; and Ontology Network, a blockchain infrastructure project. We are currently adding a growing number to this list of cryptocurrencies and tokenized projects with no ICO planned.
We hope these statuses will give users of Token Clarity a better sense of the kinds of activity going on with ICO deals. These statuses are sure to evolve in the future, and we may even add some more in the future, including ICOs that “successfully” close a sale (or so they say) and never announce an amount raised, or ICOs that have been proven to be outright scam deals.
Token Report is an independent financial information service founded by Galen Moore and Peter Vessenes. Galen is a financial journalist with a background in startups, venture capital and launching news sites. Peter is a co-founder of the Bitcoin Foundation, and launched the first VC-backed Bitcoin company in 2011. He is managing director at New Alchemy, a boutique consulting and investment group based in Seattle, Wash., that is making a pre-seed investment in Token Report.
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