ICOs White Papers: identity card or lark mirror?

Paola Cerchiello (), Anca Mirela Toma () and Marco Caluzzi ()
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Paola Cerchiello: University of Pavia
Anca Mirela Toma: University of Pavia
Marco Caluzzi: University of Pavia

No 197, DEM Working Papers Series from University of Pavia, Department of Economics and Management

Abstract: The Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is one of the operations based on DLT or blockchain technology that allows fundraising activities for an entrepreneurial project, by issuing utility tokens instead of a security or an equity token. ICOs are a new and promising tool to support innovative ideas with the potential, due to the underlying technology, to shape the future of the fundraising systems and architectures. The present paper is twofold: on one hand, it offers a dataset of 760 ICOs containing several variables, completely checked, harmonized and validated through the comparison of alternative sources, that can be used as a benchmark for further analysis. On the other hand, it investigates research hypothesis aimed at highlighting plausible success drivers that can be extracted from white papers taking into account also the team composition and the social media exposure. Our results show that the variables derived from the white papers, such as the existence of the appendix, the picture of the team, the sections and the nr. of pages are statistically significant with a differentiated impact on the probability of success or failure of an ICO.

Keywords: ICO; whitepaper; information disclosure; blockchain; social exposure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26
Date: 2021-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay
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