ICO market ‘in a lot of trouble’ after Bitcoin price slump, BitPay

Sonny Singh, the Chief Commercial Officer at cryptocurrency payment service BitPay, has warned the initial coin offering (ICO) market is in a lot of trouble.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Singh pointed out that the market has changed considerably since last year, when getting an ICO token listed on an exchange like Binance could increase its market valuation by up to $1 billion.

Since the Bitcoin price drop at the start of the year, ICOs are no longer in favour and are down by around 95%, he said. “People aren’t really trading ICOs as much anymore. People are still trading a lot of Bitcoin, but until Bitcoin and the others get back up to $10,000 the ICO market is going to be in a lot of trouble and a lot of those ICOs will never make it back to where they were eight months ago.”

Defining moment catalyst

Singh said it is hard to say whether we’ve reached the bottom of the Bitcoin price drop, but suggested prices could start to rise again in 2019 if there is a “defining moment catalyst” such as Goldman Sachs launching a Bitcoin trading desk.

“I think next year you’re going to see the big entrants become real, where you see Goldman does launch a trading desk, Fidelity does launch a Bitcoin product, Square offers Bitcoin processing for merchants and BlackRock launches an ETF. So all that will then become real and then you’ll see some adoption actually and then you’ll see the prices bouncing up again,” he concluded.