Digix's Eth Holdings More Valuable Than its Token's Market Cap

Some tokens hold more eth than the total value of their market cap according to our analysis of data provided by Santiment.

SingularDTV, for example, holds six times more eth than the complete value of their tokens with the project currently having $61 million worth of eth while SNGLS’ market cap is just $13 million.

Gnosis has nearly twice more eth, $54 million worth, while their market cap is $33 million. With another outlier being Aragon’s $64 million worth of eth at current prices compared to their market cap of $28 million.

Digix too has more eth than their market cap. The tokenized gold project is currently the biggest ICO-ed eth holder after the Ethereum Foundation, having circa ◊470,000 ($130 million).

Their market cap (pictured), stands at only $107 million, making the project itself some $20 million richer than all of the DGD holders.

That might be perhaps why they’ve decided to asks DGD holders for permission to spend a coincidental $20 million worth of eth, or some ◊70,000.

Some token holders appear to be against it, some appear to creatively suggest they should sort of take a fiat loan by collateralizing the eth through Dai rather than selling it, some appear to be just about in favor, while plenty, presumably, do not even know about it.

But why are we seeing a situation where the assets of a “company” are valued, in some cases far more, than their “shares” or tokens?

One answer might be that the market is just uniformed with the focus being on the big coins and the expectation being that the rest follow.

Another answer might be that perhaps there isn’t sufficient incentive to “force” ICO devs to really do their best in delivering, or maybe there isn’t sufficient focus on growth or perhaps there isn’t enough capacity currently to accommodate growth.

Then you can say just where is revenue meant to come from? In something like DGD for example, it is mainly transaction fees from tokenized gold, which amount to just about $4,000 so far. Hardly much to drive demand for DGD over the many other alternatives.

Then you can also say just why was all this eth sat upon? It is about $100 million now, but it was some $1 billion at the peak in December, to not account for the tokens Digix Global holds in addition.

There’s a lot of things that could have been done with all that money. Advertising being an easy one. Who exactly knows about tokenized gold? How many would know if a TV spot was taken or even a slot here on cheekynodes?

Many ICO-ed projects have of course achieved quite a bit and we’re not ignoring that. Including DGD which has some $2 million worth of tokenized gold currently, something that is in many ways impressive.

But ICO-ed projects do have to realize that they are in a new stage now where you have to effectively deliver value and if the market is valuing you less than your assets then obviously the market thinks you haven’t quite delivered.

That statement could of course be argued with as there are plenty, even very reasonable, buts and ifs, yet, at least in addition, certain maturity now should hopefully start taking hold in refocusing on delivering value because at the end of it you can’t really argue with the market.