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This decision seems to have been in the works for some time. Crunchbase News reached out to Twitter on February 9th of this year and was told that the company was still assessing its stance on cryptocurrency ads at that time.

More than one month later, with the story from Sky News and a confirmation from a well-informed source, it looks like the result of that rumination will be to bring down the ban hammer.

The Great ICO Ban

Twitter isn’t alone either, as many tech giants are foregoing ad revenue ostensibly in the name of protecting users from financial exploitation. major platforms to ban blockchain ads back in January. Last week, Google that it would ban ads for certain financial products, including binary options and “[c]ryptocurrencies and related content” including wallets, ICOs, exchanges, and trading advice.

According to , companies in the crypto space are now “shut out of 70 percent of the world’s digital ad market,” when accounting for Facebook, Google, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent’s recent bans.

This may not bode well for existing cryptocurrency companies or upstarts looking to raise an ICO, a popular fundraising mechanism among those looking to finance blockchain projects.

In previous reporting and analysis, Crunchbase News found that ICOs delivered at least 3.5x more capital to blockchain startups than traditional venture capital funding rounds have since 2017. In other headwinds news, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) . And, in an effort to comply with existing regulations, °ä´Ç¾±²Ô¶Ù±ð²õ°ìÌýsuggests that many founders are . The exemption stipulates a 12-month lock-up period where securities can’t be traded, which will slow investors’ sprint to liquidity at cryptocurrency exchanges—one of the few merits tokens claimed over traditional equity shares.

Taken together, market and regulatory forces may finally start to cool the heels of this very hot sector.

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After a massive ICO, Bancor’s token is sinking in the markets. Bloomberg in a recent article, noting that “[a]fter raising $153 million in a matter of hours in June,” Bancor has seen the “price of its token decline 56 percent.”

If Bancor was a traditional tech IPO, it would attract harsh coverage exploring its failure to launch in the public market. With ICOs, however, there simply isn’t enough historical data to use as precedent, so it’s harder to hand out performance grades.

However, the : Its token sold so over $4 per unit this summer and now trades for around $2. That’s bad.

Continuing the theme, Crunchbase News looked up , checking their initial performance — often fueled by hype, unsophisticated investors, market momentum, hokum, and dreams — against what markets have done with them since their debut.

Our somewhat hasty evaluation painted a rather dismal picture of the current market.

Of course, not all ICO’d tokens are actually in use – this report that “Only One in 10 Tokens Is In Use Following Initial Coin Offerings” – but among those that are trading openly it wasn’t hard to find a pattern of decline.

Tezos, which raised over $230 million in its ICO, has declined in pre-launch trading. After , the coin is now worth $1.67, .

EOS, which raised $185 million in its ICO, has seen the value of its token slip as well. Indeed, EOS , only to fall under the $1 market in the third quarter. It has since recovered to the $1 range, still a dramatic decline in mere months.

Picking a third example – and stopping after to avoid going on for too long – is a similar story. The blockchain asset for the cannabis industry raised more than $183 million in its ICO, and has showing its price spiking to the $1.89 in October. It has since fallen to about $0.33, a staggering decline.

It’s still early days for ICOs, and no one expected every coin offering to be free of failure. But the massive deceleration in interest in these tokens — using their price as a proxy — after their debut, indicating higher interest in the financing event than the underlying token could bedevil future offerings if investors pull back after seeing prior, early paper returns incinerate.

From the :

Broadcom makes biggest ever bid for Qualcomm

• Chipmaker Broadcom has made an unsolicited offer of $105 billion to buy Qualcomm in a transaction that would reportedly rank as the largest technology M&A purchase ever. The proposed deal, which would include assumption of$25 billion in debt held by Qualcomm, the world’s largest maker of mobile phone chips, is valued around $130 billion.

MetricStream raises $65M

• , a Silicon Valley-based provider of governance and compliance software, has raised $65 million in a new financing round led by Clearlake Capital and joined by new and existing investors. The latest round brings total funding for the 18-year-old company to $196 million.

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Spotlighting immigrant founders

• Immigrants launch more than a quarter of new U.S. new businesses and number heavily among tech startup founders. In the first of a two-part series, Crunchbase News spotlights three immigrant entrepreneurs who have scaled startups in mobile gaming, cloud computing and enterprise software.