Initial exchange offerings (IEOs) have raised $38.9 million with token sales in 2019, reports BitMEX Research, the analytics arm of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX.
While early IEO investors have had lots of opportunity to profit, returns have been typically poor once the tokens become tradable.
On average, the teams behind IEO tokens were found to have made just 4.4 percent of the total supply available for purchase.
The remaining tokens will be kept to fund development of related projects by selling them through cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance and Huobi.
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So far, the amount raised through IEOs is comparatively small to the $12.8 billion made by Ethereum-based ICOs.
Still, BitMEX researchers calculated a total IEO market capitalization of $907.7 million (when based on disclosed total token supply and original price.)
“Therefore, there are opportunities for project teams to make considerable profits from selling coins they granted to themselves,” BitMEX Research wrote.
“While exchanges, traders and subscribers may have done very well from IEOs thus far, we are less confident on the outlook for long term investors. However, this is simply a high level analysis – we have not looked into any of the individual projects in detail,” it concluded.
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