There is nothing hidden between heaven and earth, says the adage; and in the world of cryptocurrencies, where blockchain technology ensures that all aspects of its occurrence are revealed as in an open book, there is even more transparency: all its record is in plain sight, at least for a moderately trained eye.

However, when it set out to quantify investments in the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) over the past four years, the elementus team found a significant discrepancy in the estimates of various information providers. In fact, these were in a range ranging from $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion.

The reason for this inaccuracy, says Max Galca in the article "Four years of token sales in a single graph," is that the primary source of investment amounts comes from the reports of those who launch each ICO. That approach did not turn out to be entirely reliable, so to estimate the total investment since early 2014 it was necessary to go directly to the source, ICO by ICO, blockchain by blockchain, but limited to those over $100K in revenue.

The following graph shows the increasing pace of ICOs since January 2016 and how the initial offers for the last 3 months exceed the total accumulated up to September of this year.

The graph of the amount collected per month in the same period is more dramatic, since except in May 2016 alone, the accumulated collection remained below $100 million dollars until April of this year, and then climbed three times over $1 billion dollars - July, October and November 2017. The ICO feast, despite some pessimistic opinions, is raging.

The final amount of capital that the ICOs attracted in four years was, according to the detailed study of elementus.io, 6.3 billion dollars and with growth prospects. November turned out to be the record month in initial currency offerings as 148 ICOs closed, although funds reached their all-time high in October - $1.39 billion versus $1.38 billion in November.

In the 4-year history of the ICOs, there is no doubt that 2017 was positioned as the year of the massive adoption of this collection tool. Not only did the cryptoecosystem actors finance their projects through this method of fundraising, but even companies linked to Disney used ICO to raise funds.

The evolution of ICOs over the last four years can be observed in an animated graph below: