Bitcoin Forum

The head of Binance’s recently-launched $1 billion venture fund says that the company believes the initial coin offering (ICO) market is in a bubble and is hoping that it will pop soon for the health of the wider blockchain industry.

Ella Zhang, whose official title is Head of Binance Labs, told Bloomberg that while the bull market — at least as far as ICOs are concerned — helps attract more interest, it also results in unreasonable valuations.

“We’d like the bubble to break,” said Zhang, who formally joined Binance in May. “We still see a lot of hype in the market, valuations are high and unreasonable. We really think if the bubble bursts, it’s a good thing for the industry.”

As CCN reported, ICOs have already raised more money — at least $9 billion — in 2018 than all of 2017, even as regulators have ramped up their scrutiny of this booming industry and consumer interest in cryptocurrency has declined considerably.

EOS creator Block.one raised more than $4 billion in a crowdsale that concluded last week, while chat app Telegram raised $1.7 billion in a private sale that was restricted to fewer than 200 investors.

Zhang’s comments are notable, particularly given the fact that Binance itself held an ICO last year. More recently, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao authored a blog post in which he argued that an ICO is a vastly more effective way to raise capital versus traditional venture fundraising.

Despite concerns over an ICO bubble, Zhang revealed that Binance Labs has already made direct investments in four projects and said that the firm has no qualms about investing directly in both company equity and crypto tokens.

Zhang said that Binance, which operates what is currently the world’s highest volume cryptocurrency exchange, plans to develop a new program — called “Community Governance Initiatives” (CGI) — to help the company weed out and delist scams and other projects that do not live up to their promises.

“The main purpose of this is to fight scams and sh-t coins, and to boost crypto and blockchain technology,” she explained.


Reference: https://www.ccn.com/were-waiting-for-ico-bubble-to-pop-head-of-binances-1-billion-vc-fund/

Hey guys i need your comment regarding this topic?

Kind of agree..I dont see it as a bubble about to burst...just as a massive movement of money from crap projects towards 10-20 real value ICOs

I sincerely wish it wasn't a bubble, and the creation of "Community Governance Initiatives" (CGI) that to help the company weed out and desist scams and other projects that do not live up to their promises. I think that's a good idea.

I agree with that, there must be a balance if you want to keep the ICO. So there is a natural selection between a really good ICO coin and a scam ICO coin. Because too many unimportant coins are scattered whichever is, their goal is simply to take unilateral advantage.

Undoubtedly, it is possible that cryptography is a new big bubble. But this happens every time when some attractive event or new interesting technology starts to develop rapidly and acquire an increasing number of followers. Each new crypto investor inflates this bubble. In my opinion, today it is not even half-inflated and we still have time to use these opportunities.

I think yes, i would personally like to see more compliant icos, regulated, registered and approved by government or some officials and all their business should be transparent and public, only such steps can make market more real, only real projects will get a chance to come up so the end user and investor will be safe, i think we need strict filters for new icos.

Maybe binance knows already of what is good to make their business become smooth balancing system on their total operations, and they take more advantage to their business in order that more people attracted to transact on their business exchanger sites because of interesting offers and clarifications system that high trust of people wants to go for them and transact because of their new development system.

If it were not for scammers who are trying to steal money from investors, then it would be possible to recognize ICO as a good idea. But in reality the majority of projects that have collected a soft cap will not show us their final product. This really was done only to raise funds and inflate the bubble. This problem manifested itself last year and many are looking for a way out of it.

I don't think the price of the coins are overpriced. It has grown up by their own capabilities. Besides the price fluctuated which encourage people to invest in it.

Investors noticed long ago that when CNN and other media analytics told that everything is awful it needed to buy because some time later mentioned assets would grow extremely high and fast.
I am not going to persuade anybody but I really consider that this article has an intention to tangle investors.
Anyway everybody has to make its own and a well-considered decision

Maybe as more and more people get burned investing in not so good ICO's
that the negativity towards them will be so great it will overshadow all
ICO's and that bubble will pop, its really hard to say though because
just by visiting the announcements section of the forum its clear that there
are plenty of projects to get involved in so there is still interest in ICO
investment and people looking to turn a easy profit!

If this statement is true then I think it is the right step in the right direction. The ico industry needs something like a structure that will regulate the market and weed out the scams... It is high time people stopped getting scammed.

In part, I agree, because a lot of bad projects collect money and do nothing, and they can still pump up very much. I also believe that this market needs to be healed and throw away all bad projects

No. Its a growing industry with massive potential to change the financial world dramatically.

Just simply compare the ICO market to a healthy IPO market and you will see that this is no way a bubble.

8 billion in 6 months for ICOs is junk change compared to the 100s of billions IPOs have came up with.

A healthy IPO market means a healthy market with strong inovation.

EOS is the only overhyped project right now. Another similar platform only raised no more than 20 million dollars. Remember ethereum crowdsale only raised 16 million but due to the solid team to create a new protocol called smartcontract and it was on the second place of coinmarketcap. EOS has been wasting 4 billion for nothing.

They are correct with their assumptions though! Hard to argue against what they are saying and despite the fact they are echoing these thoughts many are having, it doesn't mean the bubble will burst overnight. It might take months or even years but they are correct in assuming it will burst eventually.

Yes I agree as long as the benefits goes to everybody especially the last part of the statement which refers to the scammers because these people knows only  how thief,  I really hate those scammers even the hackers. >:(

I really agree,, we need knowledge like this ,, and to see the balance of cryptocurrency (ICO). and need a good filtering,, so no fraud happens later, we do not want to lose.

Most of us know that token prices don't react like usual market after listing, its a combination of manipulation and speculation. After ICO many coins start to spend millions on just advertising so that they can create demand on market (atleast make other think so) so that they can sell off all their holding on those buy orders.

Thousands of ICO have already turned out to be a scam or atleast spent all seed fund in world tour and ads without bringing anything that they have promised during ICO. I don't like to call it a bubble but you shouldn't heavily invest in tokens.

There are people who are willing to take risk to invest in these ICO and so is the reason some of the projects are able to collect huge amount of money and not because it is a bubble, how do you determine what is a bubble when people are willing to risk even when the project is not listed in any exchanges, i would like to see a situation where only legit and solid projects are able to collect funds.

ICO as such is a bubble. Each and every individuals are coming up with ICO to raise fund for every crazy ideas they have on the mind.
ICO has enabled some real projects to reach the success without which they might never have existed but we really needs a regulating body locally or globally that audits the works of ICO issuing companies.

Only analyze ( prediction ), and because of this they take step to support their analyze, that's good. There's faith and trust into crypto project will make market have good respond and ( maybe ) some people will follow their step, nothing wrong with that. But I'll take wait and see because my money is stuck and I can't do nothing. Just wait and enjoy the numbers.

Yeah, a bit of yes, I think. Last year, cryptocurrency gain it's all-time-high peek and that makes every ICOs on the run.

But if bubble gonna burst, some investors could also pop, losing profits.

I partially agree with such statement. I think the statement is not completely true. Such type of statement proves that there is a huge movement of the money from the projects named cap. But this can be seen as bubble also. Now it is dependent on the situation and reaction of the market.

That’s a very informative post. If Binance takes the initiative of eliminating the scams and other projects, it would bring good result s in the market. It will definitely boost the crypto market and the blockchain system.

Today, you can see a large number of ICO projects. It became so popular and fashionable that ICO decided to go all out. There should be more projects which offer long-term investments. Because only financial pyramides can tell that you'll immediately become a millionaire after investing.  The best way to profit from ICO is to invest into ideas which are already turned into projects. Have a look at the proect which is in my signature. I believe in this ICO.

I agree with you there are projects that are really bad for traders, Some investors ride the hyped but they don't even know the whole project- it must be vaporware and no real uses.They said that EOS is ETH killer i think it's not!