WirtschaftsWoche Report Says German ICO Crypto Token Project See Up to 90% Drop in Value

Recently, German business magazine WirtschaftsWoche reported that German ICOs have lost up to 90% of their capital.

WirtschaftsWoche has found that, so far, only eight startups with a head office in Germany have completed an ICO. Many other German ICOs were carried out by legally independent companies abroad. The coin of financial group Naga, which is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (Frankfurter Börse) was bought by Naga Development Association Ltd. and issued in Belize.

They invested in such digital financing rounds, so-called Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), in the hope of five-digit returns. Starting in January 2017, they could be achieved within one year, for example with Ethereum. It is the world's most important cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, gaining around 17,000 percent in the period.

Among the projects that raised their ICO out of Germany, only two managed to keep the value of their coins stable on the Internet exchanges for cryptocurrencies: Neufund and Wysker, two Blockchain projects from Berlin. Neufund is working on a financing platform, Wysker on a shopping app. Five other projects, including the Frankfurt financial start-ups Savedroid and Iconiq Lab, lost between 40 and 92 percent in value. RedBux, a project from the erotic industry, finished its ICO already in May 2018. The coin is so far but listed on any official crypto exchange.

Notably, in the summer of 2017, IT industry association Bitkom informed that German IT startups continue to prefer a classic Initial Public Offering (IPO) over an ICO for raising capital. In a survey of 302 IT and internet startups, 22 percent of respondents reported that they planned to go public, while only three percent said they wanted to raise funds with an ICO.