Public Token Sales Hit $40 Million as Capital Went Private

$40 million is what public ICO, IDO and IEO sales raised in the second quarter of 2026, across 47 deals, according to CryptoRank’s July 1 close. That is the weakest public-sale quarter in four years, and it is 95.3% below the cycle’s dollar peak.

The figure is not a funding drought. CryptoRank’s July 29 fundraising report counted $12.86 billion raised by crypto companies in the same quarter. Venture funds and a thin stack of debt deals took almost all of it. Retail’s door did not close because the industry ran out of cash. It closed because the cash changed rooms.

The Quarter That Closed at $40 Million

On June 10, while the quarter was still open, CryptoRank put the haul at $58 million across 37 sales and warned that Q2 could be the worst public-sale stretch in five years. May had already printed 13 sales, the lowest monthly count since December 2020, when only 4 sales closed.

1/ Q2 2026 Could Mark the Worst ICO/IDO Quarter in the Last 5 Years

Only $58M was raised through IEOs, ICOs, and IDOs in Q2 2026, marking an 85% decline QoQ.

The number of public sales also dropped sharply, falling from 105 in Q1'26 to just 37 in Q2'26 (-65%).

Another notable… pic.twitter.com/EWr7P6HSd6

— CryptoRank.io (@CryptoRank_io) June 10, 2026

After June finished, the same desk restated the quarter. The July 1 print was 47 public sales raising $40 million. Sale count rose as late June deals landed. The dollar total fell. Either way, public issuance was a rounding error next to private capital.

First-quarter public sales had already cooled to $390 million across 105 deals. The second-quarter close sat nearly 90% below that print in dollar terms, without CryptoRank needing a new percentage. Against the cycle high of $849 million across 429 sales in Q1 2025, disclosed public fundraising is down more than fourteenfold.

Venture Capital Still Wrote the Big Checks

CryptoRank counted $12.86 billion across 271 completed transactions between April and June, against $8.87 billion in Q1 2026 and $14.25 billion in Q2 2025. Venture capital was the largest channel, at $4.99 billion across 218 venture rounds, or 39% of all capital. Debt reached $4.36 billion from only 9 transactions, within $633.9 million of the venture total.

Q2 2026 FUNDING CHANNELS

Public token sales were 0.3% of the $12.86 billion total. They are a different bucket from the $76.4 million raised in public equity, which was a Coincheck $65 million post-IPO placement and an $11.4 million Solmate deal, with no IPO in the quarter.

One borrower dominated credit. IREN’s $3.65 billion facility was 84% of Q2 debt and the largest financing of any kind. Mining-labelled deals took $4.71 billion across 5 transactions, and CryptoRank said every one of those funds AI compute rather than mining. Acquisitions spread out even as they shrank, falling to $3.33 billion from $4.51 billion a year earlier, across 40 transactions instead of 6.

THE THREE ENGINES THAT STILL PAY

• Venture books: Coinbase Ventures joined 15 rounds and led 1, a coverage model, while a16z crypto joined 12, led 7, and sat in $2.46 billion of those rounds.
• Late-stage names: Paradigm appeared in 4 rounds totaling $1.39 billion, and Sequoia Capital in 4 rounds totaling $1.27 billion.
• Debt outliers: Nine facilities delivered almost as much cash as 218 venture rounds, so a handful of borrowers now move totals that hundreds of seed deals cannot.

The private market is open and concentrated. CryptoRank put unique crypto investors at 651 in Q2 2026, down from an all-time high of 2,564 in 2022. Only 2020, when quarterly participation ran between 250 and 450 investors, was thinner. Cheques still clear. Fewer people write them, and almost none of those cheques are public sale allocations.

Why Retail Stopped Buying New Tokens

Public sales are the one fundraising channel a regular buyer can still see. That is why their collapse reads like a death in the industry, and why it misleads. Galaxy Research, in its Q1 2026 venture review, counted $4 billion into private crypto companies across 355 deals, a 50% drop in capital from Q4 2025 but only a mid-teens drop in deal count. Later-stage companies took about 57% of that money. Trading, exchange, investing and lending names alone took about $2.6 billion.

Buyers of new tokens have a simpler reason to stay out. In July, CryptoRank looked at 113 projects valued above $100 million that launched between 2024 and 2026. Eight still traded above their token generation event prices. The other 105, or 92.9%, did not. Median returns across that set were -95.7%.

Public fundraising is no longer the primary funding route for crypto startups. Capital is increasingly flowing through private rounds, while public sales have become far more selective.

CryptoRank.io, July 1, 2026, on X

The names that held up had products, not launch-day stories. Hyperliquid’s HYPE led the eight winners at +1,519% after its November 2024 airdrop, with CryptoRank placing the token near $61.52 and the market cap at $13.7 billion, still about 20% below a June record of $76.70. Ondo was next at +101.4%, tied to demand for tokenized U.S. Treasuries, and still 81% below its December 2024 peak of $2.14. A launchpad allocation in a project with no fees, no users and a high fully diluted value has been a losing ticket.

That record is why teams skip the public round. A private sale prices the token for funds that can sit through a lockup. The public sale, if it happens at all, is a distribution event at a worse price, aimed at people who have watched 92.9% of large launches fail. Unlocks then add float after listing. Plasma’s XPL, for one, had a $150.61 million unlock on the September calendar, 63.2% of market cap, when team and investor coins left their cliff. Retail learned that calendar the hard way.

Two Years After 496 Sales, Only 47 Remain

Dollar volume and deal count did not peak in the same quarter, which is the cleanest way to see how the market changed shape before it shrank.

PUBLIC TOKEN SALES, SELECTED QUARTERS

Q2 2024 was the busiest quarter, 496 sales that raised $341 million. Capital peaked three quarters later, $849 million from 429 sales in Q1 2025. Q3 2025 still printed $816 million, then the slide ran through $482 million in Q4 2025, $390 million in Q1 2026, and $40 million in Q2. From the 496-sale high to 47 sales, count is down 90.5%.

From Q3 2022 through Q2 2026, CryptoRank tallied $4.29 billion across 3,989 public sales, about $1 million per sale. The June 10 snapshot had already counted $4 billion across 3,017 sales since the start of 2024. Those cumulatives are large because 2024 and early 2025 were crowded. They are not a picture of what a new project can raise in public now.

IDOs Remain the Default Public Format

The mix inside that shrinking door barely moved. CryptoRank said IDOs accounted for 68.6% of public sales in 2026, with IEOs at 19.9% and ICOs at 11.5%. Over the past year IDOs were about 75% of public sales. Since 2020, 8,126 public sales break down as IDOs 70.9%, IEOs 16.7% and ICOs 12.4%.

What did change is size per deal, in the wrong direction for anyone hoping the slump is just fewer junk launches. CryptoRank put the average disclosed public raise at $2.08 million in 2025 and $3.15 million in 2026 year-to-date, the highest of this cycle. Fewer projects come to market, and the ones that do still want a larger cheque from a smaller crowd. That is a private-round habit wearing a public-sale label.

Launchpads still exist. They no longer set the cost of capital. A team that can get Coinbase Ventures or a16z into a round does not need a DEX sale to fund development. A team that cannot get that round often cannot fill a public sale either, which is how 496 quarterly sales become 47 without a matching collapse in total crypto fundraising.

Watch the Unlaunched Tokens

The missing public sales are not all dead projects. Plenty of teams raised in private, kept building, and delayed the token. That is rational after a year in which most listings failed. It also stores supply.

When new coins stop coming to market, short-term sell pressure from launch-day farmers eases. The other side of that trade is a backlog. Projects that already have investors, unlock schedules and exchange conversations can list in a bunch if prices recover. The quiet quarter then becomes a crowded tape, and the same retail bid that refused IDOs in Q2 gets asked to absorb several delayed TGEs at once.

New sale rails are already being built around that distrust. On Solana, at least one scheduled primary-sale design now tries to split the wallet that pays from the wallet that receives the allocation, so a public buyer is not permanently tagged on-chain. That is a plumbing fix for a social problem. People still remember who got hurt in the last public round, and they want the next one to leave fewer fingerprints, not a better white paper.

One August Round Raised $1 Billion

The pattern did not reverse after June. CryptoRank’s July recap put venture investment at $1.36 billion across 41 rounds, the lowest round count in a 12-month window. Crypto.com’s $400 million strategic round was 29.4% of that month. Unique institutional investors in July fell 30.7% to 140.

LATE SUMMER CONCENTRATION

• August disclosed total: $1.58 billion across 28 venture rounds that reported a value, up 5.4% from July as round count fell 22.2% to a two-year low.
• Polymarket: a $1.00 billion round at a $21 billion valuation, led by 1789 Capital, equal to 63.4% of August’s disclosed total.
• Without the largest deal: August raised $578.5 million against $1.10 billion in July, a 47.3% drop, with seed and pre-seed at $42.5 million against $100.1 million.

Galaxy’s Q1 review already flagged the squeeze on new managers: about $1.1 billion went into eight new crypto funds, the fewest in a quarter since Q3 2020, while U.S.-headquartered companies took 70.2% of invested capital. Spot ETFs and digital-asset treasury stocks give large allocators a way to hold the sector without sitting in a seed round, and a later SpaceX listing that pulled cash from crypto ETFs showed how fast that money leaves when a bigger listing appears.

Public token sales are still on the calendar. They are no longer how this industry gets paid. Q2’s $40 million close sits next to $4.99 billion of venture, $4.36 billion of debt, and an August in which one prediction-market round raised twenty-five times the entire public-sale quarter. The next useful number is not whether another IDO fills. It is how many delayed tokens come to market at once, and who is still willing to be the bid.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Difference Between an ICO, an IEO, and an IDO?

An ICO sells tokens from the project’s own site, an IEO runs the sale on a centralized exchange, and an IDO runs it on a decentralized launchpad. CryptoRank’s long-run count is 8,126 public sales since 2020, with IDOs at 70.9%, IEOs at 16.7%, and ICOs at 12.4%, so the DEX launchpad is the default wrapper even as the dollar totals collapse.

When Did Public Crypto Token Sales Peak This Cycle?

Capital peaked in Q1 2025 at $849 million across 429 sales. The busiest quarter by count was Q2 2024, when 496 sales raised $341 million, so the market printed its largest cheque total after it had already started doing fewer deals.

How Many 2025 Token Sales Are Still Above Their Sale Price?

CryptoRank found that 63 of 533 public token sales in 2025, or 12%, still traded above their initial offering price by late December, which is a wider 2025-only set than the 113 large names it later screened across 2024 through 2026.

How Hard Is It to Raise a New Crypto Venture Fund?

Galaxy Research counted about $1.1 billion committed to eight new crypto-focused funds in Q1 2026, the fewest new funds in a quarter since Q3 2020, with an average fund size of about $125 million and a median of about $55 million.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of fundraising figures published by CryptoRank and Galaxy Research. It is informational only and does not constitute investment, trading, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy or sell any token, participate in any ICO, IDO, or IEO, or commit capital to any venture round or debt facility. Readers should consult a qualified financial adviser and, where a token sale or private round is involved, a securities lawyer licensed in their jurisdiction before acting on any figure in this piece. The amounts, deal counts, and status of individual sales reflect the cited datasets as of the dates those firms published them and can be revised.