ICO analysis [payments]

[icofisher]

Hi, Folks. I have been thinking about the best theme for an article for the beginning of 2018, and decided to start with an ICO 2017 analysis.
This is a major research project so I split it into three(possibly) parts.

In the first part I’m going to give an ICO analysis developed with the icofisher.com team - a project that analyzes ICO by financial data.
It is in beta now but works fine.

ICO became exceptionally popular among crypto fans in 2017, but it is almost impossible to find any significant information about it.
I attempt to answer the question: “ Who invested in ICO in 2017 and by how much”.
 We took data from more than 40 ICO, including - EOS, Status, Bancor, Lexec, MatchPool, Tenx, IndaHash, Raiden …

So what sample do we have? 500K transactions. People invested from 0 to 150 000 ETH. 95 % of all payment was in the range of 0 to 20 ETH.
If you don’t want to read numbers - move to Summation)

Lets try to segregate all the investors by investment amount.
Using k-means for our sample and for different ranges we segregated several groups:
Ranges

0    - 0.1 ETH: 13 %  of all ICO investors(big group). It looks like it was a test transaction made by people from this group just to test a token.
0.1 - 0.9 ETH: 23 %. I assume people from this group didn’t consider ICO to be an investment and just tried the technology.
0.9 - 1.1 ETH: 14 % - people who invested 1 ETH. This was the most popular payment amount. Why?
                                 1 ETH is a valuable payment for an ordinary person, but not for a professional investor.
1.1 - 12 ETH: 34 % - The biggest cluster. It doesn’t look like a significant investment but ICO sometimes can grow to 10000%
                                         (sometimes ROI can be about 3 500 000%). For instance, 700 ETH (about 200 $) became 1000 000$.
12-580 ETH: 13% - A valuable investment. This is possibly the cluster with professional investors
More than 580 ETH: about 1 % - big investors and fonds

Groups:

Lets try to evaluate the impact of different groups.
Groups
0    - 1.1 ETH: 1 %. Small payment and the most popular payment - it is barely 1 % of all ETHs invested in ICO in 2017
1.1 - 12  ETH: 9 %
                                So now we can see 95 % of all investors made 10 % of all investments made

12 - 580 ETH: 53% This group invested more than half. Remember it is only 13 % of all investors.
More than 580 ETH: 35 % Big Players - (less than 1 % of investors) invested one third of all investments made

Let’s look at payments in greater detail :

In the group of small payments there is a leader - 1 ETH.
The most popular payment in our sample. 1 out of 10 investors invested 1 ETH in 2017.
There are also spikes on 0.5, 1,5, 2, 2.5
0-3
In the group 3 to 10, the most popular payment is 5 ETH
3-10
10-100
100-1000
There are also spikes on 50, 200, 300, and 500 ETHs

Summation:
More than half of all investors in 2017 invested no more than 1 ETH. But all the small investors invested barely 1 % of the total amount invested.
This is a sign that ICO was not as public as it looks. Also, a large number of small investors might be considered a potential part of the ICO investments market.
I assume small investors who were successful could have invested more. The main impact was made by mainly medium and big investors.
As we can see, big spikes on integer values mean that investors orient more on value in ETH than its representation in USD/EUR/RUB.
Now we can see the main trends. In the next article we will discuss connections between different ICOs.
I asked for more information from icofisher.com. Regulations on ICOs might be introduced in 2018, and it is really important to understand
how crypto fans and professional investors will be affected by that.
 How will distribution change in 2018? How will new ETH course and gas prices affect ICO?
Might it become a problem for small investors? We’ll see.
Thanks.

[Anyuaia]

Amazing research. Thanks for sharing your work. Where do you get info about investitions? What criteria were for the projects?

[icofisher]

Amazing research. Thanks for sharing your work. Where do you get info about investitions? What criteria were for the projects?

Thanks. Data is mined from ethereum by icofisher.com. We choose most active ICOs by transactions number.

[Anyuaia]

Amazing research. Thanks for sharing your work. Where do you get info about investitions? What criteria were for the projects?

Thanks. Data is mined from ethereum by icofisher.com. We choose most active ICOs by transactions number.

hmm...good methodology

[Torenta]

A surprising analysis,  2018 we will see whether this will be true!!!

[icofisher]

A surprising analysis,  2018 we will see whether this will be true!!!

Hope we'll release similar research based on 2018 data

[cryptoaxo]

I have seen some ICOs with max buy. will it solve this uneven distribution ?

[aadebiyi]

Nice write up... lets hope for a better 2018

[icofisher]

I have seen some ICOs with max buy. will it solve this uneven distribution ?

Yes. When all outliers are filtered the distribution of payment values looks pretty fine. But it changes a picture of impact made by max payments in ICOs investments.

[Torenta]

there should be a "crypto insurance" for public investments. Simple people should know that their investments will be protected from extreme volatility and fraud. This report is amazing because it shows, that main part of investments are maid by blockchain specialists and professional investors, people that knows about risks and have assets protection mechanism.

Big money investors = their business. Small or ordinary people are just a tool for making money multiplied

[Liqbo]

Thanks for this meaningful research, great & valuable job for the whole community