AMF Report, data on successful ICOs in France

The AMF has published a report on the success of ICOs in France, as part of the UNICORN project launched in February 2018. The AMF report analyses the ICO market in France, highlighting both its successful and fraudulent cases, which FinanceFeeds magazine has quantified at 2261 reports.

As far as fraudulent reports are concerned, they focus mainly on cryptocurrencies rather than on ICOs. ICOs remain a marginal financing element in the complex of French global finance.

In France, there were in total 15 completed ICOs, which generated total funding of 89 million euros from the observation period of the UNICORN project.

The characteristics of the French ICO market, as the AMF report explains, would follow the following characteristics: 

• They are used by small/medium sized companies to develop a community of investors well connected or interested in the security of their capital;
• They concern blockchain technology-based projects;
• They have an individual fundraising size of between 1 and 180 million euros;
• They already have traditional financing channels at their disposal;
• Only 6% of the ICOs have characteristics of financial investment products.

All entrepreneurs who launched ICOs in France agreed on the need to carry out careful auditing procedures so that they could present responsible and robust projects but, at the same time, they were also very careful in carrying out very thorough AML controls.

In total, AMF has received 83 projects of which 15 have been completed, 3 are underway and 65 are still in the pipeline. Of the 83 projects submitted, 74 are utility tokens, 4 are currency-like payment systems, 4 are financial product-like projects and one is hybrid in nature and has a repurchase right.

For the projects already completed, the smallest has collected only 200,000 euros, the largest has managed to reach 20 million. However, these figures are modest when compared to what was invested by other forms such as venture capital which have invested 2 billion in 2017, and 0.3 billion in the third quarter of 2018.