While speaking to Bloomberg, Ethereum Co-founder, Gavin Wood, discussed Ethereum and how the ICO markets will evolve. Wood also responded to questions from the show’s hosts regarding the market downturn, and how that affects digital infrastructure development.

   While speaking to Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg’s “What’d You Miss?” Wood explained that the market downturn is actually a good thing as far as production and development of products goes, saying that “when a fairly substantial interest cycle is going, we find that there’s quite a lot of noise and it’s not always so easy to tell between the people that just want to be in the space and the people that are truly down for the technology.” 

 Ethereum Co-founder believes ICO Future Still Looks Bright

   Weisenthal then mentioned that interest in ICOs has “collapsed” and asked Wood what he feels could spark continued interest in initial coin offerings, many of which are built on Ethereum’s network. Wood notably mentioned that “ICOs still have a while to run,” but also noted that “there’s going to be a lot of evolution for ICOs down the line.”

   In 2018, ICOs have in fact seen tremendous success despite the general cryptocurrency market downturn, with year-to-date fundraising far exceeding that of previous years. According to CoinSchedule, in the first eight months of 2018 alone, ICOs have raised a total of over $18 billion, compared to the $6.2 billion raised in all of 2017.

   The majority of fundraising in 2018 has been led by a handful of high profile ICOs, including EOS, which has raised just under $4.2 billion, followed by the Telegram private sale, which has raised $1.7 billion. Despite the cryptocurrency market decline, ICO fundraising has not fallen off as the bear market persists, with the majority of this year’s ICO fundraising occurring in June.