Location, Location, Location?

Monday, December 4, 2017

The Location of Legal Entities & Founders behind ICOs

Over the past months, we have worked with European VC firm Atomico on the data side to contribute to their annual State of European Tech Report. This year’s report wouldn’t be complete without a data-driven section about the crypto and ICO frenzy, so together with Tom from Atomico, the TokenData team performed the most comprehensive analyses on countries and cities out of which ICOs are launched.

We analyzed the (legal) location for >1200 ICOs in addition to capturing the geographical location of ICO projects’ founders (CEO & CTO) using publicly available social media profiles.

Here are the key takeaways from the data:

• Legal Domicile ≠ Founders’ Domicile
  One in four ICO projects is legally registered in a different county to that of its CEO/Founder
   
• Europe counts highest amount of ICO projects…
  There are more ICO projects coming from Europe-based entities and European founders than any other region
   
• .. but ICO founders from North America have marginally out-raised those from Europe
  $1.3B for team ICO-USA and $1.2B for team ICO-Europe
   
• Switzerland is a leading home to the legal entities behind ICO projects, but not always to their founders
  ICO Legal entities based in “Crypto Valley” have raised more than $800M. However, this number drops to “only” $200M when we look at where the founders of these ICOs are actually based.
   
• Two out of three ICO projects have founding teams located in different countries
  This is the most important and interesting conclusion in our opinion. Bitcoin, Ethereum and many other blockchain protocols started off – and still are – open source projects with contributors from all over the world. This pattern continues in most ICOs. If the future is decentralized, then founding teams will be as well.

Want to see all of the data insights? Full report with sleep graphs can be found here.

Weekly Update

• We’ll be at TokenSummit in San Francisco this week, hit us up if you want to grab a coffee or beer and get some free TD swag!
   
• Best quotes from the ICO Financing Conference @ U.C. Berkeley
   
  • “We won’t get a lot of retweets for obvious reasons” – Spankchain Founder about their project’s media strategy
     
  • “You could call something a tomato, widget or utility coin, but at the end of the day we do our analysis” – S.E.C. counsel clarifying the Howey test once again
     
  • Bonus Points: “If I denominate my tokens in a hard commodity, for example pork bellies, does that mean they won’t be securities under S.E.C. rulings?” – Founder of unnamed ICO trying to financially engineer his way out of U.S. securities law…
     
• NEW on TokenData.io: 
   
  • Token Analytics (BETA) – We just launched a new analytics section on TokenData. The first tool that we’ve built is a news aggregator that plugs into all news channels and chat applications for a token sale. If you’re sick and tired of signing up to all telegram/slack/discord channels to assess a project, this tool will make your life much easier. This is a first release, so any user feedback is more than welcome! 
     
• Weekly Token Data:
  • Nr of completed ICOs (wk/mo/ytd): 11 / 11 / 366
  • USD Raised (wk/mo/ytd): $72M / $72M / $4.3B
  • Calendar: 32ICOs this week

Token Sale (ICO) Calendar

Mon (12/4)

• Arbitrage Crypto Trader – Cryptocurrency trading application
• Aurora – Decentralized banking and finance platform.
• Dimpay – Global payment system that is built on the NEM blockchain
• ExsulCoin – Blockchain for the vulnerable populations
• Galactikka – Self promoting social media
• Gameflip – Decentralized ecosystem where digital goods on all gaming platforms can be sold as liquid assets.
• INS Ecosystem – Decentralized consumer ecosystem
• KickCity – Social media network
• REMME – Security system
• Satoshi Brewery – Satoshi Brewery in the city of Murmansk, in Northwest Russia
• Sether – Social Network Data for Blockchain Businesses
• Squeezer – Platform that helps software developers to builds apps
• Trade.io – P2P cryptocurrency trading platform

Tues (12/5)

• Artex Global – Global artwork platform
• Play2Live – Ecosystem for eSports and gaming industries
• Rentberry – Decentralized home rental platform
• SophiaTX – Blockchain for Business
• VCXCoin – VCXCoin is a potential ecosytem for visionary investors.
• VVToken – Cryptocurrency debit card

Thurs (12/7)

• Debitum Network – SME/SMB Financing platform
• DreamTeam – eSports platform
• Fintrux – Small business loans platform
• Narrative – An ecosystem that rewards content creators
• RAISON – AI Platform for investment and personal finance
• Sorbase – Cryptocurrency trading exchange aggregation
• Swissborg – Private banking with smart contracts
• ViMarket – A 3D marketplace that allows users to create and share virtual reality (VR) experiences

Fri (12/8)

• Florio – Health monitoring application
• Galaxy eSolutions – Ecommerce business for Pre-owned and Refurbished Consumer Electronics Sector
• Loci – IP and patent research and registration platform
• Spectiv – Virtual reality streaming platform
   

Sun (12/9)

• Gaze Coin – Customizable monetization for virtual reality

[addtoany]