Thread by @lawmaster

1/ ETH reached 18-month low today and there is this narrative that the price of is dropping because ICOs are liquidating their treasuries. Well, it’s completely wrong. Let’s look at the data!

theblockcrypto.com/2018/11/20/ico…

2/ The sum of ETH holdings of ICO treasuries is now a little over 3.57M ETH (3.5% of supply). In April, the treasuries held 4.65 million ETH (4.5% of supply) indicating that they likely liquidated (or moved) about 23% since then.

3/ Despite the decline in ETH price, the selloff hasn’t been as drastic as many analysts anticipated. In the past two months, treasuries of projects that held ICOs liquidated (or moved) 172,00 ETH, or ~4.6% of total holdings.

4/ The most aggressive sellers were Status, district0x and Tierion (in order), which sold (or moved) nearly 55,000 ETH combined since September 9. Out of the 57 companies I tracked, 50% didn’t touch any of the ETH in their treasuries.

5/ At least 11 ICOs currently have a smaller “market capitalization” than the amount that they hold in their ETH treasuries alone (see table below).

6/ Seven companies hold more than 200k ETH (not including Polkadot, which has funds stuck in the Parity bug.)

7/ In aggregate, ICO-related project treasuries have moved or liquidated 64% of the amount that they initially raised. In other words, they are still holding 36% of the initially raised amounts (with ~5% stuck in the Parity bug.)

8/ As of September, ICOs had moved or liquidated 62%, which means that in the last two months, only 2% of the total raised ETH was liquidated. Therefore, the popular narrative that ICOs have been actively selling their ETH reserves is inaccurate.

9/ One can assume that most of the projects have significant enough cash reserves that they haven’t had to sell cryptocurrency reserves yet. And since the price of ETH continues to drop, it’s safe to assume that projects won’t sell ETH until they absolutely must.

10/ But since the majority of ICOs aren’t generating any meaningful revenue yet, they will eventually be forced to start selling ETH to cover operating expenses. When that happens or when the SEC forces ICOs to liquidate, Ethereum is likely to experience true capitulation.