Fundraising without operating evidence

The fundraising-evidence gap is older than this cycle

The 2017 to 2018 ICO bubble raised approximately $20 billion across thousands of token sales. The post-mortem data on that cycle is settled. A 2023 industry review found 81% of ICOs from the bubble had ended as scams, failures, or defunct projects within one year of their token sale. A Boston University study from 2018 found that more than half of crypto startups completing ICO fundraising were dead within four months of token launch. The MIT Technology Review analysis of 902 ICOs from 2017 found 46% had already failed at time of analysis, with another 13% classified as "semi-failures" (non-communicating teams, dormant projects, no path forward). Net failure including semi-failures: 59%.

The Satis Group classification went further. It assessed the 2017 ICO cohort by intent at fundraising: 80% scam, 10% genuine projects that failed for non-fraud reasons, 10% projects that survived the first cycle. The 80% scam figure was contested at the time by industry voices who argued it was too pessimistic. Subsequent failure data has been consistent with the original classification.

The Initial Exchange Offering model emerged after the ICO collapse as a supposed cure: move the sale to a centralised exchange's launchpad, add exchange-led vetting, add KYC. The 2019 IEO cycle raised $1.5 billion across approximately 160 projects, an order of magnitude smaller than the ICO era. Scam rate did fall. But most IEO tokens still trade below their listing price within months, and the exchange vetting model never became operating-evidence verification. It was a marketing-quality filter.

Same pattern, larger raises, 2024 to 2026

The instructive shift in 2024 to 2026 is that the presale-scam template now operates at significantly larger individual raise sizes than the 2017 cohort. Several factors converged: better marketing infrastructure (aggressive PR distribution networks, paid influencer placements, hyper-targeted social media), longer presale windows (17 months in RCO Finance's case, vs the typical 30 days of an ICO), and a more sophisticated regulatory-language posture by the issuers (vague references to MiCA, claimed jurisdictions, claimed audits).

The structural absence is identical to 2017. The standard checklist a presale offers a prospective investor is: whitepaper (often AI-generated), tokenomics page (often without enforced vesting), "team" page (often anonymous or with fabricated bios), claimed audit certificate (often unpublished or for a different code version), claimed partnerships (often unsubstantiated). What is missing is operating evidence: revenue, throughput, technical artifacts (working testnet, public GitHub, deployed product), verified team identity bound to enforceable roles.

The named cases on this page represent a representative slice of the 2024 to 2026 pattern. They are not the worst of the period; the worst cases are the smaller-scale variants that never reach industry coverage and so are absent from named-case databases. The cases below are notable because they raised at sufficient scale that the failure was documented.

What KPI evidence at fundraising should look like

The standard counter-argument to enforced KPI evidence is that it would block legitimate early-stage projects that do not yet have revenue or throughput. This is true if the verification design is binary (revenue or no revenue). It is false if the verification design is route-specific and tiered.

A real-world-asset platform like the Mantra Network claim should be required to attest to the underlying assets: registered facilities, audited reserves, regulatory filings. A renewable-energy issuance project should be required to attest to the operating installation, the meter, the attestor relationship. A trade-finance project should be required to attest to the trade flow, the counterparties, the historical settlement record. A pure software project at pre-revenue stage should be restricted to qualified-investor tiers with higher investor-protection rules, not retail.

The protocol primitive that makes this work is the Attestor Registry plus the canonical-JSON evidence dossier, the same primitive the ESG and Global Trade marketplaces already use. The evidence dossier hash anchors on-chain at the start of the presale. The presale's marketing claims and the on-chain evidence cannot diverge because the front-end renders from the dossier. The team's claimed identity must match the on-chain registered identity, or the presale cannot open.

This is more discipline than the standard 2024 to 2026 presale offers. It is less discipline than a regulated securities offering. The gap between zero discipline and regulated-securities discipline is where the Launchpad operates, and where the gap currently produces the named failures on this page.

Continue the study

This page covered the fundraising moment. The next page covers what happens after: capital released day one, milestones never gated. Even institutional-grade 2025 token launches that did clear some fundraising filters are collapsing post-TGE because there is no contractual link between operating delivery and treasury access.

For the upstream stages of the study, see the death scale and unverified mints.