Token Report Newsletter: Comfortably Normal

The biggest lie in crypto is, “This fork, it’s different.”

Kyle Gibson
Token Report
4 min readApr 23, 2018

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See you on the dark side of the Moon

Last week we made some projections for how much certain ICOs will raise in their public sale, relative to their hard cap. While we wait to see how our projections match with reality, let’s look how the market’s hard caps are trending overall:

Since December, the average hard cap for ICO public sales has nearly halved, but has remained steady above $25 million USD.

Compare that to the amount of ICOs opening per week, and it paints a picture of a stochastic public sale market, with some weeks having twice as many ICOs opening as the last, plus just as wide variations in total expected proceeds.

For certain crowdfunding ecosystems, such as Stellar, monitoring the volume and relative hard cap size of upcoming ICOs could potentially be used to predict exchange trade volume trends for the base currency.

Anything in these charts jump out at you? Let us know in our Telegram forum.

Crypto Climate: 🌤️Comfortably Normal👍

Taking a macro look at the crypto market, it looks like we have made it to the new “Normal,” after the wild times in Q4 and Q1. Here’s the total market capitalization, trade volume, and courtesy of SifrData, a projection of market volatility into the next few months.

For the near future, it seems, there’ll be no more aaAAaAaAAAhHHhh!

1 Short Read: Curation Killed The Content Star

It used to be said “Content is King,” but it sure doesn’t feel that way anymore for publishers. So who’s sitting in the king’s throne now?

In this week’s short read, we advocate for the new king, Curation, and explain why cryptocurrency will play a crucial role in its regime:

King Content is dead. Long live King Curation.

Last Week’s FOMO & FUD

You don’t have to believe any of it, but here’s what the Internet was saying about people and projects in crypto last week.

FOMO:

  • Basis.io closed a whopping $133 million private sale to help launch their stablecoin, Basecoin — NewsBTC
  • Walmart filed for 2 patents which included the word “blockchain”; the first is for a third-party vendor payment service — CoinGeek
  • Batavia, a global banking payments system built on the IBM Blockchain, announced its first successful payments between corporate clients — BitcoinsChannel
  • Lympo, a fitness data-sharing blockchain ecosystem, has sponsored tennis player Caroline Wozniacki, “the first female athlete to endorse a blockchain product” — Forbes
  • Andreessen Horowitz and other VC firms have formed a “Working Group” to meet with the SEC and advocate for a “Safe Harbor” for some cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin Magazine

FUD:

  • Savedroid pulled a prank by pretending to flee Germany after closing their $50 million ICO; their contributors were not happy — Bloomberg
  • Holders of the crypto asset Nano (formerly Railblocks), have filed a class-action lawsuit in an attempt to force a hardfork of the currency, in order to recover ~$175 million in lost funds from the purported Bitgrail hack — MIT Technology Review
  • Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted in favor of “closer regulations regarding anti-money laundering in cryptocurrency” — CoinTelegraph
  • Morgan Stanley analysts say that Bitcoin mining “may no longer be economically viable” — Fortune
  • Finland tax authorities say they have identified about 3,300 Finns who owe taxes on their cryptocurrency transactions using blockchain analysis — Metropolitan

Who to follow:

From Brendan Bernstein on Twitter

Contact us:

🐦 @galenmoore / @kylesgibson

✉️ galen@tokenreport.com / kyle@tokenreport.com

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.​

Nothing contained in Token Report materials or posted at tokenreport.com constitutes an offer or a solicitation of an offer to buy or sell a security, financial instrument, or other category of asset, or investment advice or recommendation of a security, financial instrument or other category of asset. Tokens involve risk and are not suitable assets for everyone. Token Report believes its information was obtained from reliable sources but does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness and accepts no liability for losses arising from the publishing of this information. The information provided by Token Report is not a substitute for financial, legal and other professional advice. Each individual should always consult his or her own financial, legal or other professional advisors and discuss the facts and circumstances that apply to the individual.

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