Thanks to the ICO busts of 2018 and the SEC's newfound attention for a raft of altcoins, scrutiny of new projects has become much higher than in the past.
The ICO boom of 2018 was an absolute disaster. It was a Wild West that saw venture capital (VC) funds throwing money at the wall to see what stuck with little regard for due diligence. More than $7 billion was funneled into ICOs in 2018, often based on little more than a drunken conversation at a cryptocurrency party. But the stories that stick are the monumental disasters that have made ICOs synonymous with fraud.
Perhaps the most prominent of these was the Bitconnect Ponzi scheme. After promising sky-high returns and seeing the value of its token (BCC) rocket to $400, it soon left investors nursing losses of some $2.4 billion. So it's understandable that as a new bull market gathers pace there is still a degree of caution around ICOs.
Despite increased caution, though, there is no question that a fresh ICO boom is just around the corner. Already, we are seeing tentative signs of this. The monthly number of token sales has reached a two-year high, according to CryptoRank, while RootData reports that VCs allocated 52% more to crypto projects in March than in February.
