U.S. RATED MOST FAVORABLE COUNTRY FOR ICO’S – ANOTHER CRYPTO BANK SET TO LAUNCH

[Smaulgld]

https://smaulgld.com/u-s-rated-most-...set-to-launch/

[Zippyjuan]

https://www.ccn.com/81-of-icos-are-s...-share-report/

81% of ICOs Are Scams, U.S. Losing Token Sale Market Share: Report


Initial coin offering (ICO) promoters have been widely successful with regards to the quantity of projects they have been able to at least partially fund. On matters of quality, perhaps not so much.

According to a report prepared by Satis Group Crypto Research, around 81% of the total number of initial coin offerings launched since 2017 have turned out to be scams. In dollar terms, however, only 11% of the approximately US$12 billion that has been raised in these projects went to these fraudulent ICOs.

The Big Three
Per the cryptocurrency research firm, most of what was raised in the scams went to only three projects, including Pincoin, which received US$660 million and Arisebank, which received US$600 million.

“Although ~1/10th of all ICO fundraising went to Identified Scams, the vast majority of the $1.3B was from just three projects, which were all relatively old school frauds by no means unique to ICOs (Pincoin ($660M), Arisebank ($600M), and Savedroid (~$50M)). These projects each did raise those amounts we believe but are subject to extensive regulatory action,” noted Satis Group in its report.

And despite the regulatory uncertainty and waning market performance, the report further states that ICO fundraising has been growing steadily. Year to date, approximately US$7 billion has been raised, and this is close to 50% of the amount that was raised in 2017. Since the inception of ICOs, the most active month was last year in December when more than US$1.4 billion was raised.

Satis Group further estimates that the worldwide ICO market is worth about a fifth of the initial public offering (IPO) market of the United States so far this year. And this is during a period when the U.S. IPO market has recorded the highest level of activity since 2014.

However, year-over-year growth in the ICO market has slowed, and this is attributable not just to regulatory uncertainty but also to reduced enthusiasm among retail investors. Additionally, there are concerns over the slated technical changes of the major networks on which most ICOs are built on, especially Ethereum.

U.S. Regulations Pushing out Projects
The prevailing regulatory regime in the United States has also been harmful to the sector. This has resulted in a lot of projects moving out of the world’s largest economy to launch their ICOs in more friendly jurisdictions. Some of the biggest beneficiaries of this state of affairs include the Cayman Islands, Virgin Islands, and Singapore.

Last year, for instance, the ICO fundraising market share of the U.S. compared to the rest of the world was 32%. In 2018, this has fallen to 10%. Cayman Islands had an ICO fundraising market share of 3% last year, but this year it has ballooned to 40%.

[Zippyjuan]

http://fortune.com/2018/02/25/crypto...-ico-collapse/

Nearly Half of 2017’s Cryptocurrency 'ICO' Projects Have Already Died

Last year was without a doubt the Year of Bitcoin, as exploding interest in cryptocurrency fueled a massive market runup. As if that wasn’t enough excitement, some speculators took the further leap to investing in cryptocurrency projects through a lightly regulated process called an “ICO,” or initial coin offering, in which a startup sells its own crypto token to raise money.

We here at Fortune have cast a curious but frequently skeptical eye on ICOs, which from the get-go were ripe for scams. It turns out that skepticism was well warranted: cryptocurrency news site Bitcoin.com has surveyed last year’s ICOs and found that of 902 tracked by TokenData, 142 failed before raising funding, and another 276 failed after fundraising.

That’s a 46% failure rate — but wait, there’s more. Bitcoin.com found another 113 projects that it calls “semi-failed,” because their teams have gone off the radar or their community has withered away. Add those, and the failure rate jumps to 59%. Bitcoin.com says the total funding of failed projects from 2017 was $233 million.

[Smaulgld]

https://www.ccn.com/81-of-icos-are-s...-share-report/

That report highlights that the US is not a good place to pull off a scam ICO

[kpitcher]

I know a few people running ICOs, after the tepid response by a few conferences with past SEC investigators and some of the official responses by the SEC, more and more this year are only doing overseas. Even the accredited investors are being avoided if they are US based. The waters are murky in the US at the moment. Meanwhile you have a variety of oversea countries giving great tax incentives to not be a US corporation doing crypto.