In less than two months in 2018, ICO projects received $ 2 billion in funding, while for the entire 2017, the total amount invested in the initial placements of tokens was $ 5.7 billion. However, as the structure of these sales is now more and more focused on large investors, ordinary users had to try to take part in buying tokens and get benefits from it. The data show that 84% of all ICO fees this year were received from large investors and during preliminary sales of tokens. When the method of collective financing only appeared in the cryptocurrency industry, it was a democratic way of raising funds, helping to unite the emerging crypto-exchange community. However, in 2018 the situation seems to have changed.

The American company Tesla, the manufacturer of electric vehicles and power storage solutions, became a victim of hackers: having found a vulnerability in the Tesla account on Amazon, scammers got access to the cloud infrastructure of the company and used its resources for the cryptocurrency mining. The hackers found the company specializing in cyber security company RedLock. Hackers took advantage of a vulnerability in the Kubernetes service available from the Internet due to lack of password protection, which contained information for accessing the Tesla cloud store in the Amazon Web Service.

At the Cyber Days conference held on Sunday, co-founder of the Tezos blockchain project, which raised a record $ 232 million, Kathleen Breitman said the project is preparing to release tokens: "We plan on releasing the token and going rogue in the next few weeks. We're able to release the token on our own terms. For awhile I felt like I was being 'gaslit,' but then I unburdened myself of the morality of it. Things needed to move forward. It's unfair, but we need to ship the code".

South Korea, it seems, is softening its position regarding the trade in cryptocurrencies. According to Yonhap News, Choe Heung-sik, head of the Financial Supervision Service, said that the government "will support crypto-trade in the performance of normal transactions." Cho also said at a meeting with representatives of crypto-exchanges that the government would "encourage" banks to work with stock exchanges.

ICO messenger Telegram, has not yet officially begun, but already set an absolute record on the size of the collected investments. 

New price records Bitcoin will show in July 2018, says the well-known financial expert and ex-analyst of financial holding company JPMorgan Chase, Tom Lee. 

The Coinbase platform has launched the Coinbase Commerce service, which aims to help online shops accept payments in the four leading cryptocurrencies. As noted in the company, Coinbase Commerce ensures the receipt of payments in cryptocurrencies, controlling, verifying and confirming the transactions of customers in each unit.

The American Institute specializing on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) complained that they could not purchase the necessary graphics cards for research work, which were bought by the Cryptocurrency Miners. "We'd like to use the latest GPUs [graphics processing units]... and we can't get 'em," said Dan Werthimer, professor at the Berkeley SETI Research Center.

The LoopX cryptocurrency start-up, which, with the help of ICO, attracted investments of several million dollars, disappeared along with all the collected funds in cryptocurrencies. Promising "the most modern algorithm of trading on the cryptocurrency market," the start-up suddenly disappeared, closing the site on the Internet and removing all traces of existence in social networks.

In the European Union, with the help of cryptocurrency, about 4-5.5 billion dollars are illegally laundered annually, the head of the European Police Service (Europol), Rob Wainwright, said in an interview with BBC. The total amount of illegal income in Europe, he said, is 100 billion pounds sterling, of which about 3-4% is laundered using cryptocurrency.