Crowdsales of blockchain projects continue to attract billions of dollars from investors, but more than a half of start-ups that launched ICOs in the second quarter of 2018 failed to attract the planned amount of investment.

55% of the projects that tried to raise funding via ICO in the second quarter, failed to meet their investment goals. In the first quarter, the share of failed ICOs was 5 percentage points lower, experts of ICORating revealed.

Nevertheless, the volume of funds invested in blockchain start-ups via crowdsdales continued to grow and reached $8.3 billion, while in the first quarter they managed to raise $3.3 billion.

ICORating analysts note that not all projects with failed ICOs were of poor quality. But the overall quality of projects raising funding via ICOs deteriorated significantly.
The largest ICO project of the second quarter of 2018 in terms of attracted investments was the payment and billing blockchain system PumaPay, which managed to raise $117 million.

According to the study, 57% of ICOs were aimed at attracting funds to projects at the development stage. And it is the most unfortunate category, with the highest percentage of failed ICOs. 58% of them could not attract more than $500,000.

The majority of investors were interested in participating in projects that had already produced a minimally viable product (MVP). On average, such projects managed to raise $34.5 million.

Finance remains the most popular industry among successful ICO projects. It is worth noting that the the number of ICO projects in the gambling industry doubled from the previous quarter.