ICOs Capitulate, 300,000 ETH Sold

Some 160,000 eth has been sold by ICOs during the past 10 days, with another ◊120,000 sold in the previous 20 days, making it a total of ◊283,000 (~$54 million) within the last 30 days.

That’s triple the amount sold in August, with much of this selling by ICOs done during the past few days as in effect it seems they capitulated.

As can be seen, for August ICOs were selling between ◊1,000 to ◊5,000 a day with an occasional ◊10,000 plus here and there.

For September, however, we have a huge sell-off of ◊82,000 on September the 4th, just a day before ethereum’s price effectively crashed.

Then, on the 8th of September we have a ◊28,000 sell-off, with circa ◊10,000 being a more common number for this month.

Of course this data is not completely accurate. It is based on the movement of eth from addresses known to belong to ICOs.

Mistakes can be made and in a way are to be expected, but Santiment is very responsive in correcting them. During a miscalculation of sorts regarding Digix, for example, Nemo Cerovac of Santiment told Trustnodes:

“Digix seems to be holding funds on a contract instead of a regular address, so the system inaccurately had their contract address marked as a team wallet.

This caused an error in SANbase, and the wrong amount was live from Sep. 4th to Sep 6th, when we discovered the bug and corrected it to 69k ETH – the actual amount spent.”

As a further example Etheroll has clarified that what was marked as spent was in fact casino payouts, with that too now seemingly corrected.

So they are estimates but indicative as 2-3 mistakes out of 670 tracked tokens of which 128 have any eth is a fairly decent failure rate.

The biggest sale by far has been that of Digix. Prior to it, their eth holdings had a paper value of about $150 million, above the then market cap of DigixDAO.

Their sell-pressure, which may have contributed to the flash sell-off last week, has now halved the value of their eth holdings. In addition, the DigixDAO market cap is still below it at currently $68 million.

Making it a double whammy, as they’ve not only halved their eth holdings, but they’ve also halved their Digix holdings. Which means hopefully the rest of the ICOs now sober up and seriously consider some professional funds management.

Not that Digix is necessarily solely to blame, the second ICO for example sold ◊28,000 with a further ◊17,000 by the third. But one can argue Digix wasn’t being very smart in quickly sending ◊54,000 to Gemini instead of slowly liquidating over months. Not that they necessarily sold it all, but appearance is very much a factor.

They could have, for example, collateralized either through DAI or in a more traditional manner by taking out a loan with eth as collateral. They could have sold some of their tokens, rather than eth, which may have had less effect on both. They could have arranged promissory or actual ownership of the eth in chunks of say ◊1,000.

In other words, they need a professional treasury manager as their instant liquidation, at least in appearance, may have been far more costly than it needed to be.

Yet for any Digix there are a lot more projects which might not care at all. That will now hopefully begin to change as eth investors become wiser and more demanding through the benefit of experience, but what we are struggling to establish is just how much ICOs have now left.

That’s because Santiment data does not really seem to be accounting, in their data of current ICO holdings, for the sales. That’s based on it being ◊3.3 million during early August and it being ◊3.3 million now.

It may be the case new ICOs may have raised eth in the meantime, cancelling the eth sold, but it may also be the case that the circa ◊400,000 sold in the past two months should be discounted.

That would make it current holdings of ◊2.9 million, currently worth about half a billion dollars, with ◊2.87 million of it held by the top 30 projects.

Most of them are pretty decent projects, and we’re sure they would have learned from the Digix fiasco. They moreover seem to be liquidating a lot more slowly and gradually, rather than in one big scoop which necessarily affects the price.

In addition, if they haven’t capitulated by now then perhaps the worst is over. Otherwise, their weight is currently very light so it would be good for eth™ as it would increase distribution at a lower cost.

Copyrights Trustnodes.com