Crypto Coin Graveyard Fills Up Fast as ICOs Meet Their Demise | Hacker News Reader

Crypto Coin Graveyard Fills Up Fast as ICOs Meet Their Demise

bloomberg.com

130 pointselsewhen56 comments

This is disappointing level of journalism by Bloomberg. When did it become journalistic "research" to just quote a bunch of Medium blog posts on the web?

For one, the "research" quoted by this article is conflating market cap with actual realized losses. A coin's market cap tells you absolutely nothing about how much was actually raised in an ICO. If I issue 1 trillion tokens and sell one for $1, all of a sudden I'm a $1 trillion market cap.

Article's primary source found here: https://medium.com/satis-group/ico-quality-development-tradi... It claims 81% of coins with $50M+ market cap were scams...but the only data it shows is a bar chart, with no links to actual data tables driving the chart.

I agree. I think it's the end of the beginning and putting aside all the scammy hype stuff Bloomberg and others have been happy to promote, we are now entering a period where credible crypto business logic will start having an impact in mainstream financial markets, exchanges and MTF's as the space matures...

> where credible crypto business logic will start having an impact in mainstream financial markets, exchanges and MTF's as the space matures

Yeah, the only missing part is the "credible crypto business logic". Everyone is waiting for it...

Agreed. Can grandparent give a couple examples?

From the article:

Crypto coins with market cap > $50M

- Scams: 81%

- Failed: 6%

- Gone dead: 5%

- Dwindling: 2.8%

- Promising: 1.8%

- Successful: 3.8%

There's a tracking site for dead coins: https://deadcoins.com

whats the rate of failing for startups with >$50m valuation? Is there a tracker for that as well?

Yes. About 75% of venture-backed companies fail to return cash to investors.[1] Many of those failures are zombies - the company continues to operate, can cover its running expenses, but can't pay back its startup costs. In the ICO world, that would be considered a success.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3003827/why-most-venture-backed-...

So many of them are paying people living wages, or at least had been during their lifetime. Compare that to failed or scam ICOs, which do literally 0 people any good except maybe the "founder."

Well let's not forget about all the productive hosting business this is drumming up, some poor megacorporation is barely holding on by offering their cloud hosting services to all these ICOs.

(there isn't a window fallacy we can't broken here :D)

Valuation is different than market cap.

As stated in another comment, a coin only needs to sell one unit, and because of the supply; they have a large market cap.

That's exactly what valuation is.

Ask the opposite question- rate of success for startups with >$50m valuation

IMHO, it's certainly below 3.8%

You are so wrong that I audibly laughed, even though I’m in this room by myself.

Are you saying that, if you take 100 random startups and look say 5 years later at how many survived AND are valued over 50 millions, you have more than 3?

I would like to know which distribution you sample from :-)

That’s not what your comment says. It says that the rate of success of startups which already have $50m valuations is less than 3.8%.

Then I apologies for not being clear.

What I meant to say, is that if we look at the coin graveyard, we are including 100% of the failed coins -- because ICO were heavily publicized.

If we look at the startup survival rate, we are not including 100% of the attempt. Some will consume money, but never even make a blip on the radar.

If you consider the failure rate of startups vs the failure rate of ICOs, I think ICOs show a higher success rate - and even more when you raise valuation.

Here is a more extreme example: A startup valued over 1 billion is a unicorn. An ICO valued over 1 billion is at the moment (with rock bottom prices) anything above the top 18

We can disagree on the valuation formula (fair critic), but even with that a 4% success rate >50M is nothing to sneer at.

It's possible to see failed startup if we use figures from an accelator, like say YC.

From https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats/ :

Number of YC companies worth more than $100 million: >20

Number of companies funded by YC so far: 716

Let's say 20, and use the $100 million instead of the $50M as I can't quickly find YC numbers for $50 million.

Still, 20/716 is about 2.8%

So I repeat my words: a success rate of 3.8% is wonderful.

> Successful: 3.8%

What does this mean?

Not yet in one of the other categories.

It appears very little (succeeded in hitting funding targets, posted a product roadmap and a beta deployment of a chain/platform that showed some evidence of development in the past three months) per the source. Not really sure how you could justify a notional valuation of $50m before getting to that stage...

https://medium.com/satis-group/ico-quality-development-tradi... (source for the Bloomberg graph is Satis Group, an ICO advisory firm comprised of people fired from another ICO advisory firm. It's a dog eat dog world out there...)

So who is going to register f*kdcoin.com :-)

(its a dot com joke)

Am I totally misunderstanding or do the scams mean that the founders walked away with >$50m in their pockets?

If you create 50,000 coins (or shares, or whatever), and sell one for $200, then you have a "$1 million market cap!", but you actually got $200.

For a scammer behind a coin with a $50m market cap to have walked way with $50m, they would have needed to have sold all the coins at that valuation. In some cases, this may have happened. In many others, they will have sold some coins at that valuation, and others at lower valuations as the coin collapsed. In a few cases, all the transactions may have been "wash" transactions (aka, selling a coin to yourself under a fake name), and the scammer may have received nothing.

It's hard to know how much a scammer profited without digging into it, especially in the crypto space where wash transactions are so easy to get away with.

I would say it's impossible to know unless you actually run and operate the exchange(s) through which they ran all of their 'sales'. The exchanges are often complicit in listing these coins and make money from a fee which they demand in order to list and promote them. the exchanges hold all of the real power in cryptocurrency, and there are only a handful of them.

HA! No, all crypto valuations only include the free float in the market! Check out coinmarketcap.com , the leading "valuation" site, and notice that it only counts circulating supply, no matter how small a percent it is to the total supply.

All metrics related to "crypto total market cap" are based on dubious circulating supply metrics, when the reality of this is many times higher, even though it is an accounting nightmare regardless.

Next up, most coins actually did sell all of their free float / circulating supply in exchange for a more liquid currency.

So yes, the $50million projects actually received $50m in usd/btc/eth AS WELL AS granted themselves a sliver of the new currency, akin to private equity and every share company ever.

It is double plus good, and scammers are currently walking away with that. But if they are smart, they make their new coin valuable because an even greater windfall awaits and then that means it isn't a scam project at the current threshold of legitimacy.

I don't think you really understand what "circulating supply" means. It doesn't measure how much is actually changing hands, it just measures how much theoretically could. And even at that, it's very vulnerable to manipulation.

> But if they are smart, they make their new coin valuable

Citation needed. :)

I understand what it means, it doesn't matter, that is what is counted.

Also, real people or organizations have "lost" this money, right?

This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone since most of them were pump and dump schemes or Ponzi schemes.

True. And the others mostly couldn't deliver.

Also not surprising is that one of the few news on HN about ICOs compares them disfavorably to VC founding. A bit predictable, that's all.

A token is a receipt for your donation. :)

Ahem, it's a decentralized donation.

Ahem I believe you mean to say that it's a decentralized donation that uses cutting-edge, game-changing BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES that will REVOLUTIONIZE the world as we know it. /s

Using blazing fast JavaScript deep learning techniques of course.

Which a lot of donors are actually completely ok with. The insistance on seeing this new technology and the opportunities it offers through the lens of traditional equity/securities is strange.

It's not strange at all, since unfortunately the average person who bought into these ICO's thought they were similar to IPOs (and that was the dubious intention behind calling them "ICO's").

You can look through thousands of reddit posts of people thinking they were "getting in early" on some hot new tech company. You're living in a fantasy world if you think even a sizable minority gave money to ICOs knowing it was basically a donation.

Agreed about the name "ICO" being of dubious intent. That's why we tried to clear the air with our I<corn>O, https://initialcornoffering.com.

Because that's what most of these offerings are offered in terms of?

Or a payment for the pretty whitepaper you get to read.

There is too many shitcoins. Which means too much speculation. One day it will all hit a brick wall. coingecko.com has a good list with a little amount of shitcoins. But when the shit storm starts and people move their money to cryptocurrencies they will probably go to VDA which I'm guessing institutional investors use which is on cryptonaire.com

When it happens, it will be good and bad for the market. Real value in good places but a bad time in history. Due diligence everyone, due diligence.

not much different than SV startups with 90% fail rates

Oh, do ICOs give people jobs and living wages?

I'm sure you're going to come up with some esoteric edgecase, but no: it's not comparable.

I mean, they put people to work. Considering many startups, "living wages" can be quite a stretch.

Poor startup employees making $150k+, they can barely afford to eat at Marlowe 3 times a week and take 3 Napa vacations a year :*(

Early startups aren't paying that well, and they're usually in very high cost of living areas.

jobs and living wages? yes they are normal startup projects with funding. do you think they just drink beers on a beach? that's what the media wants you to see. have some critical thinking.

A quick alternate analysis of ICO liveness is found by simply checking the number of tokens currently being traded with volume on idex.market: total of 291 as of todays figures, with 195 over 1 Ether/day, 80 over 10 Ether/day and 22 over 100 Ether/day. This amounts to 35%, 23%, 9.75% and 2.6% rexpectively of the 821 reported by deadcoins.com. Further to this deadcoins.com only labels 121 of these as scam coins with the majority (633) being labelled deceased. Also, a large number of the listed coins have no references to back up the given assessment.

Seems Bloomberg's reporter neglected solid research in her haste to play the funeral drum.

This article is a PR piece about an activist investment firm that buys up and revives dead coins with a new dev team and rebranding. It is masquarading as the "I told you so" article that you already wanted to read. But thats not what it is at all

As someone that has led zombie coin revivals multiple times over the last several years (after spending months buying up a coin from bagholders), hit me up

just respond to this message and put your email in your hackernews profile

This new firm has got one thing right: Bull market or bear market it doesn't matter, you can get hockey stick growth.

Could you bring back flurbo? http://flurbo.cc

If this project is accepted can I be on the mailing list as well?

Hindu translation reserved

That seems like an interesting thing to you! A bit like a modern corporate raider, except you are doing the opposite- reviving dead things!

Can you tell us more? Give some old examples of what you did?

It sounds to me like this poster is straightforwardly asking for coins that can be pumped and dumped one last time.

not sure about that. the profit incentives are not aligned with a simple "pump and dump"

If a listed coin is revived, it should only take some minimal infrastructure spending to keep it alive.

Doing a simple pump and dump would be a waste.

To keep it alive and do what with it?

thanks!

sent you an email

Reply on news.ycombinator.com