Crypto Startups Still Raising Millions in Capital Despite ICO Decline

In late July 2019, Sony Financial Ventures joined a $14.5 million funding round for Bitcoin (BTC) bank Bitwala. Back in 2017 and 2018, such a figure might not have made many headlines, as crypto startups were raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in initial coin offerings (ICOs).

The ICO boom has, however, stalled significantly, with fundraising figures for 2019 a far cry from the massive amounts earned by projects in the two years prior. Many of the tokens that came about during the ICO mania have also lost most of their post-offering value. Since the late 2017 crypto mania, there has been a considerable uptick in regulatory scrutiny of the industry as a whole.

While the ICO boom might have waned since the middle of 2018, there is still a lot of activity in the crypto fundraising space. The only difference is that, like much of the broader industry, the prevailing narrative appears to be taking on a paradigm shift — one that crypto proponents hope is tending toward making…