What Determines Success in Initial Coin Offerings

In this paper, we analyse the determinants of success for 630 ICOs performed between August 2015 and December 2017. We find evidence that ICOs are more successful in raising funding when they disclose more information to investors (i.e. have higher transparency rating), have a higher quality rating by cryptocurrency experts, organise a presale, have a pre-ICO GitHub repository, refrain from offering bonus schemes, have shorter planned token sale durations and have a larger project team. Depending on the measure used, these ICOs also have improved ex-post performance. We conclude that for entrepreneurs it is important to make the ICO as transparent as possible and that expert ratings are a valuable means to overcome the information asymmetry problems associated with token sales.

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