One-third of all tokens launched via an ICO in 2017-18 are not listed on any exchanges, despite half completing their funding rounds last year
Despite investors dropping a whopping $12 billion into Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) in the past year, 70 percent of cryptocurrencies outside …
Context & Ripple Effects
The ICO market's collapse is now measurable at every stage of the pipeline. Earlier analyses found that of 902 ICOs listed on Tokendata.io, 531 projects raising a combined $233M in 2017 had already failed or gone dormant, and a study of 2,390 token sales showed 56% of crypto startups die within four months of finalizing their sales.
This report adds a liquidity layer to that mortality data: even among tokens from funded rounds — with investors putting $12 billion into ICOs over the past year — a third never reached any exchange listing, meaning a large share of capital is locked in assets with no secondary market at all.
First-order effects
- Investors holding the unlisted third of 2017-18 tokens have no exchange venue to exit through, turning paper allocations into illiquid positions regardless of whether the underlying project still operates.
- Projects that completed funding but remain unlisted face pressure to deliver exchanges listings or buybacks, since their token holders' only recourse is the team itself.
Second-order effects
- Exchanges gain further gatekeeping power: with listing scarcity now visibly separating live tokens from dead ones, listing fees and due-diligence standards become the de facto quality filter the unregulated ICO market lacked — a risk the New York Times flagged as early as mid-2017, when 65 projects had raised just $522M.
- The failure data feeds directly into the funding drought: after ICOs raised $13.7B in the first five months of 2018 per Reuters, quarterly raises collapsed to roughly $118M by Q1 2019, as buyers priced in the demonstrated default rates.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, token issuance migrates toward structures with built-in accountability — regulated offerings or exchange-guaranteed listings — shrinking the open ICO model that peaked in 2017-18 into a niche.
- The gap between money raised and tradable assets becomes an argument for regulators treating token sales as securities issuance, since the market's own liquidity data shows investors routinely holding instruments with no functioning market.
The trend: The ICO market is contracting from a $12B-a-year fundraising channel into a small, filtered remnant, as liquidity failure — not just project failure — becomes the metric that kills token credibility.