The current state of the ICO market
The difference between the early ICO market and the current state of the industry is stark. In the beginning, there were only a few ICOs and those were held by teams that were relatively well known inside the blockchain community that spent considerable time and effort bringing a project to life before running the ICO. After the launch of Ethereum, the barrier to entry for doing an ICO fell substantially and the number of new tokens swelled.
Increasing volume of ICOs
Before the Ethereum network, most ICOs were for a new blockchain. With Ethereum, tokens could now launch using smart contracts instead of creating the entire blockchain infrastructure from scratch. For more on how this is done, see the chapters on Solidity and Smart Contracts (See Chapter 13, Solidity 101, and Chapter 14, Smart Contracts).
Currently, 2018 is on track to have over 1,000 new ICOs:
- The amount of money raised by ICOs as a whole keeps going up
- Extremely large raises are becoming rarer...
