The team at Bitmex Research has collaborated with TokenAnalyst to take a thorough look at the treasure balances of several individual ICOs on the Ethereum network. The two teams released a report that showed that ICO teams allocated $24.2 Billion worth of tokens to themselves.
$80 Billion in Peak Value
The Bitmex and TokenAnalyst report goes on to state that this figure has fallen to $5 Billion due to current market conditions. There is also an additional $1.5 Billion of token transfers that has happened away from the ETH addresses of these teams.
The report speculates that these tokens were ‘disposed’ of. Also noted by the report is that these tokens would have a $80 Billion valuation using the peak value of each digital asset.
$5 Billion From Nothing
According to the report, the $5 Billion current valuation of tokens being owned by teams of these ICOs, can be considered as being got from nothing.
Based on current illiquid spot prices, the ICO teams still appear to own around US$5 billion of their own tokens, money they essentially got from nothing, depending on ones view.
At the same time the teams may have realized gains of US$1.5 billion by selling tokens, based on coins leaving team address clusters.
Although this figure may also be an overestimate, as coins could have left the team address cluster for a variety of reasons.
Notable ICOs Mentioned in the Report
The report went on to highlight the token allocation for the teams of several ICOs. They include Veritaseum (VERI), SingularityNet (AGI), Polymath (POLY), Kin (KIN), Dent (DENT), Gnosis (GNO), Maker (MKR), Telcoin (TEL), IoT Chain (ITC) and QASH.
What are your thoughts on the research by Bitmex indicating that ICOs allocated $24 Billion worth of tokens to themselves? Please let us know in the comment section below.
