The influence of ICObench ratings on initial coin offerings’ success

• Autor(a) principal: Mergulhão, Mariana Isabel de Jesus
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/24374
• topic: Initial coin offerings; Token sales; Blockchain; Cryptocurrencies; Ratings; Success factors; Oferta inicial de moeda; Criptomoeda; Fatores de sucesso

The Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a modern topic and has been in vogue since its creation. Commonly denominated as Token Sales, the ICOs are assisted by blockchain technology and emerged for the purpose of supporting entrepreneurs on financing their ventures, that are still in the initial phase, in a decentralized and global scale. It has been gathering more and more people and money over the years, leading many studies to be conducted around its sphere, in order to understand this shift in public capital markets. Despite this fact, ICOs are still a fertile topic where even more branches of research can be born to analyze. ICO ratings already proved to have impact on the success of the projects, in this way, this study aimed to provide evidence with the support of a more robust database, with 5581 ICOs. Based on the ratings available at ICObench website, hypothesis tests were carried out and supported with boxplot graphs, in order to measure and understand the association between the variables. This paper finally reassures previous literature, by showing that ratings are in fact associated with the success of the projects. It concludes that higher ratings have a positive influence on the fundraising success of the ICOs. Other variables as the platform where they operate, the number of currencies accepted as payment, the number of team members, if the hard-cap and soft-cap were established and others were included in this study. Additionally, the database was divided by the different sectors and developed an overview on the ratings distribution and the projects’ performance for each one of them. This may give some insights and help future research take the next step on performing individual and detailed analyses for every sector.