10 ICO Statistics Investors Should Know

The world of blockchain technology is one that's literally filled to the brim with investment opportunities. No matter where you look, there's money to be made and potential for amazing things to happen.

You can invest in Bitcoin and succeed beautifully. You can buy up Ether or Dogecoin with the potential to earn tons of cold, hard cash. You can even invest in Bitcoin without directly buying it through stocks and other options.

Though there are many ways to invest in the blockchain world, very few have the pull of the Initial Coin Offering. ICOs are hot as can be, because everyone wants to be a part of the next cryptocurrency to boom in price.

ICOs might sound like a great investment, but don't be so gung-ho about investing in them quite yet. These ICO statistics prove that there's good reason as to why people call crypto one of the most dangerous investments you can make.

If you are looking for a safe investment, ICOs aren't it. In fact, the vast majority of all Initial Coin Offerings that were released in 2017 were later proven to be scams.

Investopediapointed out that over 80 percent of all coin offerings from last year ended up folding abruptly or being cited as a scam. This only proves how important it is to know the signs that an Initial Coin Offering is a scam. If you don't, you'll see your investment vanish before your eyes.

Most ICOs never actually make it to the trading stage.

Let's say you decide to dive in and invest in an ICO for a change of pace. You have read the white papers, you have done your due diligence, and it all seems pretty darn good. So, you wait for the tokens to reach the trading stage so you can cash out your investment... and nothing happens.

Months later, nothing still happens. Surprised? Don't be. The same study from Investopedia also revealed that only 8 percent of all ICOs made it to listing. Those are some pretty grim ICO statistics, aren't they?

Way fewer people own cryptocurrency than you'd think.

One of the more shocking ICO statistics deals with the number of people who invest in cryptocurrency and ICOs. With all the wild buzz you hear, you'd expect people to be investing in Bitcoin left and right.

Only 5 percent of all people own cryptocurrency, and even fewer invest in ICOs. Of the people who do, over 50 percent of all investors are white males, making this one of the most heavily-skewed demographics in the investing world.

Around $233 million dollars worth of ICOs collapsed from last year alone.

If you look at ICO statistics, the risk is very apparent. Around 59 percent of all ICOs that were launched last year have already failed—entirely, or partially. This equates to around $233 million that has been flushed down the toilet.

Oddly enough, this isn't as bad as it sounds. Around 75 percent of all startups that are done with traditional venture funding fail. So, it's not all bad.

Over 10 percent of the $3.7 billion raised by ICOs has been stolen.

It appears that startup failure isn't really the biggest problem ICOs have. ICO statistics show that theft, not natural failure, is the real Achilles' heel of the blockchain technology world.

Research firm Ernst & Young recently noted that around 10 percent of all capital raised by ICOs was stolen due to hacker attacks or other similar nefarious plots. The amount stolen, which was taken from a total of 372 different ICOs, equated to about $400 million.

The most common theft route was phishing, proving that low tech attacks still manage to work in a high tech world.

The volume of ICOs has exploded, but the number of successful fundraisers has dropped.

With the wild Bitcoin boom that we've all witnessed, it's not surprising that many companies want to have their own ICO. The number of ICOs being released has exploded in recent years, but the truth is, it's not beneficial.

It used to be that 90 percent of all ICOs would get the funding they needed to succeed. Since so many ICOs are now being offered as investments, that number has now shrunk to 25 percent. Soon, it will be likely that only a small sliver of ICOs will get their required funding.

Despite all this, the average ICO investor will see an 82 percent profit.

With all the risk that ICO sponsorships bring, there's definitely a lot of reward to be seen. On average, a typical ICO investor will bring in a net profit of 82 percent as long as they invest in a wide range of different coin offerings.

The key takeaway from the Coin Telegraphreport was that you have to act early in order to profit. People who waited more than 60 days to sell their coins suffered massive losses. Those who sold within the first two weeks post-ICO, though, turned profits of around 178 percent.

This year alone, ICOs raised over $6 billion.

One of the most impressive statistics found on ICOData was the sheer amount of money that was raised via ICOs in 2018 alone. As of the time of writing this to the beginning of 2018, Initial Coin Offerings have accounted for over $6 billion dollars.

That's a lot of venture capital!

The majority of Americans are really uneducated about ICOs.

As profitable as ICOs can be, the majority of people who talk about them really don't know much about them. In a survey that was conducted by Bitcoin Magazine, 21 percent of respondents thought that investing in ICOs was illegal. Another 61 percent weren't sure.

In other words, 82 percent of the population doesn't know if it's even legal to invest in ICOs—let alone how to do it.

If you invested in the ICO with the highest return on investment, you'd be very rich.

NXT currently holds the proud title of being the ICO to feature the highest return on investment, and all other ICO statistics back that up. If you invested $100 into NXT when it opened, you would have become a millionaire by now.

That's because this ICO has a 1,265,555 percent ROI. Wow.