10/05/2018
Author's comment: There are several models for categorizing ICOs, as many coin offerings are not so easy to fit to a specific category. But in any case there are some interesting observations we can make from the statistics:
1. A small portion of ICOs are based on some tangible underlying assets
2. Some otherwise popular big businesses like real estate investing and gambling are still small players in ICOs
3. Music and other digital rights management categories are also small, although an integration of tokens into DRM offers promising new opportunities
4. Healthcare and insurance are also small, although it sounds quite natural that we will see more insurance tokens sooner or later
5. Data usage and trading – e.g. how people could earn money from their data – are still very small among ICOs.
For example, let’s think of real estate. We can say that security tokens as a certificate for real estate or property ownership doesn’t disrupt the real estate business – it just saves a lot of paper work. We can also think of utility tokens as a rental payment option, which could create some new ways to offer places to live, e.g. with a pre-paid model. But actually this is only the beginning. When we start to think of more combinations of owning and renting, rights to live, trade ownerships and rights, participating in new development projects and creating different sharing models, then tokenization actually does offer tools to disrupt the real estate business.
Right now, ICOs are mainly about fundraising, often with very artificial utility token concepts. They're not disrupting existing businesses, finance models and processes. But next wave could.
