Analysis: out of 902 ICOs listed on Tokendata.io last year, 531 projects that raised a total of $233M in 2017 have either already failed or are dormant online
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2017 ICO boom that Smith + Crown tracked as 65 projects raising $522M by mid-year has now produced its first mortality audit: Tokendata.io finds 531 of the 902 ICOs it listed last year — representing $233M raised — have failed or gone dormant online. The finding lands while the market is still pricing new token sales, and it quantifies what the New York Times warned about a year ago regarding the unregulated nature of ICO fundraising.
The Tokendata numbers are an early snapshot of a pattern later studies confirmed at larger scale: Bloomberg's analysis of 2,390 completed sales found about 56% of crypto startups die within four months of their token sale, and The Next Web found one-third of 2017-18 ICO tokens never listed on any exchange. Eight years on, CoinGecko reports over half of the 20.2M tokens launched since 2021 are inactive — the same failure profile recurring at vastly greater scale.
First-order effects
- Investors who funded those 531 dead or dormant projects are holding roughly $233M in effectively unwritable-down assets — tokens with no functioning team or product behind them.
- The remaining 371 listed projects now carry the burden of proving they are not statistical noise, since more than half their cohort has already gone dark.
Second-order effects
- Exchanges and listing services face growing diligence pressure: with one-third of ICO-era tokens never reaching any exchange, listing decisions become the de facto quality filter that the unregulated fundraising stage never applied.
- Data trackers like Tokendata, Smith + Crown, and later CoinGecko become essential infrastructure — their mortality statistics shape whether new capital enters token sales at all.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across cycles — 2017 ICOs, the four-month death rate Bloomberg measured, and CoinGecko's finding that over half of post-2021 tokens are inactive — then majority token failure looks structural to permissionless issuance rather than a one-cycle anomaly, strengthening the case for investor-protection rules around token sales.
- Capital allocation in crypto may consolidate around a small surviving minority of tokens, with the long tail treated as disposable by both issuers and buyers.
The trend: Token issuance reliably produces majority failure rates regardless of cycle — from 2017's ICOs to the millions of post-2021 tokens — making mortality statistics a permanent feature of crypto-market infrastructure.