The volume of ICO (Initial Coin Offering) market in Russia reached over USD 293m since the beginning of 2017, thus surpassing the volume of traditional venture investments of the entire 2016 more than twice.

RBC.ru reports that with reference to Director General at Skolkovo–Venture Investments Vasily Belov, who made that statement at the Open Innovations forum and added that the venture market made USD 128m last year.


“As we can see, the volume of investment into ICO surpassed the volume of the traditional venture market in less than a year,” he noted.

The analysis covered open data about 25 Russian projects working with ICO. The largest five of them received investment of around USD 190m in total.

Da Vinci Capital Managing Partner Oleg Jelezko believes that ICO is still a crowdfunding platform for private investors, not for venture funds. According to him, venture funds view ICO as an opportunity to raise funds, not as investment.

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