ICO Success Drivers: A Textual and Statistical Analysis

Recently, tech-savvy start-ups and SMEs have begun to finance their business by raising funds through the issuance and sale of “branded” newly minted digital currencies. Since this alternative capital market is largely unregulated, investors need to separate the drivers of business success from those that indicate failure, or worse, fraudulent money-raising. Through standard logistic regression and extreme value logistic regression, the authors are able to shed light on the riskiest business projects. In particular, they find that the existence of a white paper, the number of advisors, the number of people on the team, and the presence of a Telegram chat are significant factors useful for discerning a successful capital raising from an unsuccessful one. Conversely, the non-existence of a company website and an inactive Twitter account are indicators of a possible scam.