The ICO Phenomenon and Its Relationships with Ethereum Smart Contract\n Environment

Abstract

Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) are public offers of new cryptocurrencies in\nexchange of existing ones, aimed to finance projects in the blockchain\ndevelopment arena. In the last 8 months of 2017, the total amount gathered by\nICOs exceeded 4 billion US$, and overcame the venture capital funnelled toward\nhigh tech initiatives in the same period. A high percentage of ICOS is managed\nthrough Smart Contracts running on Ethereum blockchain, and in particular to\nERC-20 Token Standard Contract. In this work we examine 1388 ICOs, published on\nDecember 31, 2017 on icobench.com Web site, gathering information relevant to\nthe assessment of their quality and software development management, including\ndata on their development teams. We also study, at the same date, the financial\ndata of 450 ICO tokens available on coinmarketcap.com Web site, among which 355\ntokens are managed on Ethereum blochain. We define success criteria for the\nICOs, based on the funds actually gathered, and on the behavior of the price of\nthe related tokens, finding the factors that most likely influence the ICO\nsuccess likeliness.\n