Blockchain Investment Trends (1H 2019)

16 Sep 2019 by svet

1 of August teQatlas site (origin and founders are unknown, LinkedIn page has 76 followers) published brief report named "Blockchain Investment Trends (1H 2019)". As its authors claim "We have analyzed around 2.5k Blockchain companies backed by 1.8k investors through 2.5k conventional and alternative funding instruments".

They've concluded: "From 2014 to 1st half of 2019 Conventional fundraising and Token Generation Events combined amounted to $32.3B funding into Blockchain sector worldwide. ... after 4 consecutive years of growth and record yearly funding of $15B in 2018, the value of capital raised during TGEs has since decreased to $2B in 1H 2019. Nonetheless, it's still twice more than the traditional funding total value during the same period ($1.2B in 1H 2019)."

Compare that to PwC's 5th ICO/STO Report, which showed that for the first five months in 2019 "more than 250 token offerings have been successfully completed, managing to raise in total ca. USD 3.3 bn". We see that there's a significant difference between those two estimates, which, probably, can be explained by that teQatlas neglected to included in its data set the Bitfinex's $1 bln. IEO on iFinex in May 2019.

Among another their findings are: "Roughly 36% of Blockchain startups now meet the hard cap during TGE" and that there's "The downward trend in the TGE popularity monthly and quarterly". The later contradicts their own graphs which shows the following (in $ and in number of deals): Aug 18: 349 (17); Sep 18: 167 (17); Oct 18: 184 (20); Nov 18: 257 (29); Dec 18: 339 (19); Jan 19: 99 (9); Feb 19: 53 (10); Mar 19: 282 (29); Apr 19: 237 (40); May 19: 1205 (34); Jun 18: 219 (31).

It shows that the number of TGE deals is slowly but steadily rising from about 15-20 in Summer 2018 to about 30-40 in Summer 2019, which is much better indicator of "popularity" that the volume (which roughly stays the same). Regardless those obvious blunders I believe that this amateurish report makes us more good than otherwise, for example, by proving the following IEO statistic about most popular launchpad platforms:

"Binance Launchpad (36.6); Coineal Launchpad (24.5); IDAX Foundation (16.4); Gateo.io Startup (15.8); Bittrex Launchpad (15.2); ZBG Launchpad (12.00); KuCoin SpotLight (10.8); OK Jumpstart (9.3); Hubi Prime (8.8); Cobinhood Coin Offering Platfrom (7.2); Ethfinex Tokinex (6.2); LBanks Launchpad (6.1); BitMax Launchpad (3.1); Exmo IEO (2.8); ABCC Hive (2.7); BitMart Launchpad (1.9); HotBit Polaris (1.5)."