Initial coin offerings (ICOs) have gone through a free fall since the crash in cryptocurrency prices. The boom of mid-2017 gave rise to many multi-million dollar ICOs with projects challenging the flaws of existing blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin or launching as decentralized apps (dapps) built on existing popular blockchains. \ \ In a bid to explore the ICO market, MEDICI analyzed 21 major ICOs since 2017 to gain an understanding of their performance. The analysis was conducted based on several parameters – no. of partnerships, developer activity, community growth, no. of transactions, no. of token holders, and project status. The analysis highlighted the fact that despite raising huge funds, most of these ICOs are still far from meeting their promised potential. In terms of fundraising, EOS was the largest ICO with total funding of $4.1 billion; in fact, EOS does skew the whole picture considering that the total amount of funds raised by the next 20 ICOs was around $2.72 billion.
The most critical parameter for the success of any ICO is the amount of developer activity. For our analysis, we took Github data as a proxy for developer activity. The ICO community doesn’t seem to be faring well in terms of Developer activity as around 63% of the ICOs under consideration had low developer activity in terms of Github commits. The only ICO which fared well in terms of developer activity – based on the total GitHub commits – was that of Status, an open-source messaging platform. About 31.6% of these ICOs had a medium level of developer activity.
When it came to partnerships & collaborations with businesses and other projects, the picture was still not very good as almost 57% of these projects were
