8.1 Exploring Investments in the Blockchain Space - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

We will now get into the whole space of investments in the blockchain space because billions of dollars are being invested in blockchain and it's actually a fast growing market. So in this lesson, I'm actually gonna dive down into the specifics of the blockchain market. I'm gonna talk about some areas of opportunity as well as what investments have been made in that space. So, let's begin first about a category of investment called an ICO or Initial Coin Offering. This is a new type of investment which actually leverages cryptocurrencies. These Initial Coin Offerings were actually very very popular and actually drove a lot of investment, to be exact 6.22 billion in the year 2017. And it was actually a whole new category of ways of people to be able to raise capital. Many of these Initial Coin Offerings were basically completely unregulated and it was simply people putting together an Initial Coin Offering preparing a white paper and just accepting investments from people all over the world. As a result, many people who are not qualified investors were able to just simply buy cryptocurrency and invest in these Initial Coin Offerings, which had no forms of regulation and no forms of basically due diligence to ensure that they were qualified investment. As a result, many of these Initial Coin Offerings in the year 2017 have actually lost their value and many of them are worth far less than what the original investment was and many of them simply disappeared. So this was the year 2017, these ICOs continue. And in fact in the year 2018, there were actually $7.8 billion raised in these Initial Coin Offerings. But as you can see the popularity of these Initial Coin Offerings started dropping dramatically. And a lot of this also coincided with the fact that the cryptocurrency market in general just started dropping. Now also the Securities and Exchange Commission started cracking down on many of these ICOs. And in fact, some of the people that actually conducted these ICOs eventually wound up in jail. Additionally, there are many fines that have been filed against many of these ICO companies. So in a nutshell, the Initial Coin Offering space still exists but it is actually going through a transition. Whereas it used to be very Wild West in the early days it has actually started to become more regulated and it's actually being more controlled. And the Securities and Exchange Commission is really cracking down and controlling what investments are being made in the ICO space. Having looked at the state of the ICO market for 2017 and in the following lesson, I'm gonna start breaking it down and giving you an explanation of what ICOs are and additionally other categories of these digital token offerings so you can understand that, let's go do that now.