Blockchain Papers

Tariq Alsboui, Yongrui Qin, Richard Hill, Hussain Al-Aqrabi

No abstract is available for this record.

Bruno Ivančić

Cilj ovog rada je otkriti i proširiti moje znanje o distribuiranim mrežama i teoriji aukcija izradom koncept aplikacije za aukcije na Ethereum mreži koristeći pametne ugovore. Nezamjenjivi tokeni koriste se za stvaranje digitalne povjerljivosti, a prvi put bili su implementirani koristeći Ethereum ERC721 token standard. NFT-Auction-dapp je aplikacija bazirana na Ethereumu koja omogućuje korisnicima da kreiraju i sudjeluju u aukcijama NFT tokena u stvarnom vremenu, na globalnoj i distribuiranoj mreži, zadržavajući garancije plaćanja i dostave. U radu ću se služiti znanjima koja sam stekao tijekom studija na Visokom učilištu Algebra i znanjima koja sam stekao samostalno kako bih izgradio aplikaciju, objavio ju na javnu Ethereum mrežu i testirao njezinu funkcionalnost.

Feyyaz Zeren, Atike Elanur Hızarcı

In this paper, it has been aimed to reveal the possible effects of Covid-19 Coronavirus epidemic on stock markets. In the analysis using daily data between 23 January 2020 and 13 March 2020, possible effects on stock markets has been investigated with Maki (2012) cointegration test using both Covid-19 daily total death and Covid-19 daily total case. According to the results obtained, all stock markets examined with total death act together in the long run. It has been understood that total cases have cointegration relationship of SSE, KOSPI and IBEX35 and do not have cointegration relationship with FTSE MIB, CAC40, DAX30. In this regard, it is considered as one of the optimal option for investors to avoid investments in stock markets, turn to investment in gold markets, which is the safe investment port of each crisis period in long run. Also, considering the possibility of turning all life into an internet environment, turning to cryptocurrencies is seen as another alternative option for investors. In this direction, it will be the preference of investors to turn to derivative markets and to the stock markets of countries where Covid-19 is relatively rare to avoid risk.

Chunhai Li, Siming Wang, Xiaohuan Li, Feng Zhao · 5 authors

The fast penetration of Intelligent Connected Vehicles (ICVs) has become the primary growth engine of the automotive industry in recent years. Urban vehicular network consisting of ICVs is evolving towards a distributed intelligent platform for pervasive sensing, connecting and computing in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and smart cities. In this paper, we propose that parked vehicles (PVs) could be exploited for environment perception and model inference. We describe the system architecture and its typical application scenarios of distributed environment perception for city roads, parking lots, as well as for commercial and residential buildings. PVs are motivated to assist in deep learning model inference for the captured image data in such applications. Regarding the diversity of PVs in deep learning capability, a differential incentive mechanism is elaborately designed based on contract theory to emulate PVsparticipation. The experiment on the dataset of German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark is conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

Alexander Williams, Ellen Dolan


 LoA or Letter of Acceptance is a statement received. LoA is usually used as a statement of scholarship acceptance or even journal acceptance. In addition, the current issuance of LoA is still conventional, using paper as the access medium. This is certainly inefficient. In addition, the issuance of LoAs that can be accessed through the website also has certain problems. Many parties doubt the security of the LoA issued through the website, whether confidentiality is really maintained or not. To solve this problem, e-LoA (electronic LoA) was implemented using blockchain technology on the Technopreneurship Journal website. With the use of blockchain technology on this website, LoA data cannot be changed, duplicated or deleted. So that it can improve security and support transparency in the issuance and access of LoA. e-LoA issued through the website also makes it easier for parties to access and download a verified LoA.

Bryan Ford

Classical monetary systems regularly subject the most vulnerable majority of the world's population to debilitating financial shocks, and have manifestly allowed uncontrolled global inequality over the long term. Given these basic failures, how can we avoid asking whether mainstream macroeconomic principles are actually compatible with democratic principles such as equality or the protection of human rights and dignity? This idea paper takes a constructive look at this question, by exploring how alternate monetary principles might result in a form of money more compatible with democratic principles -- dare we call it "democratic money"? In this alternative macroeconomic philosophy, both the supply of and the demand for money must be rooted in people, so as to give all people both equal opportunities for economic participation. Money must be designed around equality, not only across all people alive at a given moment, but also across past and future generations of people, guaranteeing that our descendants cannot be enslaved by their ancestors' economic luck or misfortune. Democratic money must reliably give all people a means to enable everyday commerce, investment, and value creation in good times and bad, and must impose hard limits on financial inequality. Democratic money must itself be governed democratically, and must economically facilitate the needs of citizens in a democracy for trustworthy and unbiased information with which to make wise collective decisions. An intriguing approach to implementing and deploying democratic money is via a cryptocurrency built on a proof-of-personhood foundation, giving each opt-in human participant one equal unit of stake. Such a cryptocurrency would have both interesting similarities to, and important differences from, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) denominated in an existing currency.

Weilin Zheng, Zibin Zheng, Hong‐Ning Dai, Xu Chen · 5 authors

Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies and applications have flourished in blockchain research community. Massive data generated from diverse blockchain systems bring not only huge business values but also technological challenges in data analytics of heterogeneous blockchain data. Different from Bitcoin and Ethereum, EOSIO has richer diversity and a higher volume of blockchain data due to its unique architectural design in resource management, consensus scheme and high throughput. Despite its popularity (e.g., 89,800,000 blocks generated till November 14, 2019 since its launch on June 8, 2018), few studies have been made on data analysis of EOSIO. To fill this gap, we collect and process the up-to-date on-chain data from EOSIO. We name these well-processed EOSIO datasets as XBlock-EOS, which consists of 7 well-processed datasets: 1) Block, Transaction and Action, 2) Internal and External EOS Transfer Action, 3) Contract Information, 4) Contract Invocation, 5) Token Action, 6) Account Creation, 7) Resource Management. It is challenging to process and analyze a high volume of raw EOSIO data and establish the mapping from original raw data to the well-grained datasets since it requires substantial efforts in extracting various types of data as well as sophisticated knowledge on software engineering and data analytics. Meanwhile, we present statistics and exploration on these datasets. Moreover, we also outline the possible research opportunities based on XBlock-EOS.

Parminder Singh, Anand Nayyar, Avinash Kaur, Uttam Ghosh

Fog computing (FC) is used to reduce the energy consumption and latency for the heterogeneous communication approaches in the smart cities’ applications of the Internet of Everything (IoE). Fog computing nodes are connected through wired or wireless medium. The goal of smart city applications is to develop the transaction relationship of real-time response applications. There are various frameworks in real-world to support the IoE in smart-cities but they face the issues like security, platform Independence, multi-application assistance, and resource management. This article is motivated from the Blockchain and Fog computing technologies and presents a secured architecture Blockchain and Fog-based Architecture Network (BFAN) for IoE applications in the smart cities. The proposed architecture secures sensitive data with encryption, authentication, and Blockchain. It assists the System-developers and Architects to deploy the applications in smart city paradigm. The goal of the proposed architecture is to reduce the latency and energy, and ensure improved security features through Blockchain technology. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed architecture performs better than the existing frameworks for smart-cities.

Ivan Garibay, Toktam A. Oghaz, Niloofar Yousefi, Ece C. Mutlu · 26 authors

This paper explains the design of a social network analysis framework, developed under DARPA's SocialSim program, with novel architecture that models human emotional, cognitive and social factors. Our framework is both theory and data-driven, and utilizes domain expertise. Our simulation effort helps in understanding how information flows and evolves in social media platforms. We focused on modeling three information domains: cryptocurrencies, cyber threats, and software vulnerabilities for the three interrelated social environments: GitHub, Reddit, and Twitter. We participated in the SocialSim DARPA Challenge in December 2018, in which our models were subjected to extensive performance evaluation for accuracy, generalizability, explainability, and experimental power. This paper reports the main concepts and models, utilized in our social media modeling effort in developing a multi-resolution simulation at the user, community, population, and content levels.

Hamidreza Ehteram, Mohammad Taha Toghani, Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali

In this paper, we develop BlockMarkchain, as a secure data market place, where individual data sellers can exchange certified data with buyers, in a secure environment, without any mutual trust among the parties, and without trusting on a third party, as a mediator. To develop this platform, we rely on a smart contract, deployed on a secure public blockchain. The main challenges here are to verify the validity of data and to prevent malicious behavior of the parties, while preserving the privacy of the data and taking into account the limited computing and storage resources available on the blockchain. In BlockMarkchain, the buyer has the option to dispute the honesty of the seller and prove the invalidity of the data to the smart contract. The smart contract evaluates the buyer's claim and punishes the dishonest party by forfeiting his/her deposit in favor of the honest party. BlockMarkchain enjoys several salient features including (i) the certified data has never been revealed on the public blockchain, (ii) the size of data posted on the blockchain, the load of computation on the blockchain, and the cost of communication with the blockchain is constant and negligible, and (iii) the computation cost of verifications on the parties is not expensive.

Маргарита Жигас, Svetlana Kuzmina

The article considers the origins of the fourth industrial revolution, the impact of new IT processes and their integration into society and economy. The authors focus on the idea of creating a cryptocurrency Bitcoin and a new payment system based on the blockchain platform. The innovative components of blockchain technology are presented. The technological changes caused by its development are analyzed. The problems of the financial industry and the technological processes occurring in the banking market are analyzed in detail. The prerequisites and the innovation process of the formation of a decentralized monetary system are explained. The authors propose a new concept of «parallel money systems» and formulate the principles of centra­lized and decentralized approaches to the organization of the monetary system. The features of building a decentralized monetary system are described; its advantages and disadvantages are formulated. A number of arguments in favor of the validity of the adoption of the new form of the monetary system is given and substantiated; the difficulties of its development are analyzed.

Ashmitha Nagraj

Financial Technology (FinTech) has transformed Capital Markets, Payments, Lending and Risk Management through faster processing of financial decisions in real-time and expanding access to financial services digitally. Beneath these user-friendly applications, FinTech platforms rely on foundational Data Structures and Algorithms to provide consistent Latency, Scalable Throughput, Auditing capabilities, and Resilience under adversarial conditions. The purpose of this paper is to review which core Data Structures (Arrays, Linked Lists, Hash Tables, Balanced Trees, Heaps and Graphs) are used to support key FinTech Workload applications (Algorithmic Trading, Fraud Detection, Credit Risk Assessment and Blockchain-based Recordkeeping). In addition, this paper will review the Algorithmic Foundations used to enable common tasks across all these workload applications including Sorting/Searching, Optimization, Statistical Learning and Cryptography, and how Asymptotic Complexity must be evaluated with respect to practical system constraints including Caching Behavior, Concurrency and Failure Modes. There is evidence from the academic literature that Algorithmic Trading can increase liquidity in certain Market Structures while also introducing Systemic Fragility during Stress [1],[2],[3]. And, similarly, there is evidence that Fraud Detection is an inherently adversarial domain where Models and Features must evolve as Attacker Behavior evolves [4],[5]. Lastly, the Paper will discuss several open challenges associated with Scale, Security, Model Governance and Privacy; and evaluate Future-Facing Directions such as Privacy-Preserving Analytics (Federated Learning and Zero-Knowledge Proofs) and Cryptographic Agility to prepare for post-Quantum risk.

Mamoona Humayun

Background/Objectives: Tremendous growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have positively affected the field of E-Learning (EL). However, recently the education mode is shifted from the traditional classroom towards EL due to widespread COVID-19. The selection of suitable EL tool and security of EL data and environment are still the key challenges that need to be addressed. The objective of this paper is to guide the EL Practitioners in the selection of suitable EL tool and to provide a detailed framework for maintaining privacy and security of EL data and environment. Purpose: This study aims to help EL practitioners in the selection of suitable EL tool and to provide a secure framework for the security of EL data and environment. Method: Realtime statistics are gathered and analyzed to visualize the impact of COVID-19 on education around the world. The increasing demand for EL during COVID-19 is analyzed, and a detailed taxonomy is provided to make the EL practitioners aware of existing distance learning solutions. A comparison of commonly used EL tools is provided that will help in the selection of EL tools according to institutional requirements. A Blockchain-based EL framework is proposed that will help EL designer in managing the security of EL data and environment. Conclusion: The proposed framework is expected to provide a promising solution for developing a fair and open learning online education environment and will overcome the deficiencies caused by school closures during COVID-19. Keywords: COVID-19; Blockchain; Security; Privacy; E-Learning; Digital Curriculum

Emilia Vasile, Ion Croitoru

Abstract: The territorial administrative units are complex entities, with diversified organizational structures, within which a set of activities is developed for the elaboration and application of normative acts, methodological norms, regulations and programs, in order to meet the needs, needs and requirements of the local community within which act. The territorial administrative units have legal personality and comprise in their structure deliberative and executive authorities. Their main feature is that they work according to the principle of decentralization, which implies autonomy and the limited transfer of decision-making power from central to local level. Local autonomy gives territorial administrative units the right, within the limits set, to have initiatives in all areas concerning the respective local community. The territorial administrative units have their own budgets and have their own patrimony in which the goods belonging to the public and private domain of the county, the municipality, the city or the commune are included. They organize, operate and manage the financial resources and public or private property assets of communes, cities and municipalities, based on the principles of local autonomy, decentralization of public services, eligibility, legality and consultation of citizens in solving local problems of community interest.<br> Keywords: autonomy, decentralization, influencing factors, strategic planning, public services, territorial administrative unit

Henrik Sternberg, Erik Hofmann, Dominik Roeck

Despite the anticipated benefits and the numerous announcements of pilot cases, we have seen very few successful implementations of blockchain technology (BCT) solutions in supply chains. Little is empirically known about the obstacles to blockchain adoption, particularly in a supply chain's interorganizational setting. In supply chains, blockchains' benefits, for example, BCT‐based tracking and tracing, are dependent on a critical mass of supply chain actors adopting the technology. While previous research has mainly been conceptual and has lacked both theory and empirical data, we propose a theory‐based model for interorganizational adoption of BCT. We use the proposed model to analyze a unique in‐depth revelatory case study. Our case study confirms previous conceptual work and reveals a paradox as well as several tensions between drivers for and against (positive and negative determining factors, respectively) of BCT adoption that must be managed in an interorganizational setting. In this vertical context, the adoption and integration decision of one supply chain actor recursively affects the adoption and integration decisions of the other supply chain actors. This paper contributes midrange theory on BCT in supply chain management (SCM), future research directions, and managerial insights on BCT adoption in supply chains.

Fan Fang, Carmine Ventre, Michail Basios, Leslie Kanthan · 7 authors

Abstract In recent years, the tendency of the number of financial institutions to include cryptocurrencies in their portfolios has accelerated. Cryptocurrencies are the first pure digital assets to be included by asset managers. Although they have some commonalities with more traditional assets, they have their own separate nature and their behaviour as an asset is still in the process of being understood. It is therefore important to summarise existing research papers and results on cryptocurrency trading, including available trading platforms, trading signals, trading strategy research and risk management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cryptocurrency trading research, by covering 146 research papers on various aspects of cryptocurrency trading ( e . g ., cryptocurrency trading systems, bubble and extreme condition, prediction of volatility and return, crypto-assets portfolio construction and crypto-assets, technical trading and others). This paper also analyses datasets, research trends and distribution among research objects (contents/properties) and technologies, concluding with some promising opportunities that remain open in cryptocurrency trading.

Theviyanthan Krishnamohan, Kugathasan Janarthanan, Peramune P.R.L.C, Ranaweera A.T

With the rise of cloud computing, data centers, and big data, the current rigid network architecture has been found to be inadequate. The modern technological demands require a flexible and easily reconfigurable network architecture. Software Defined Networking is a revolutionary concept that separates the control plane of network devices from their data plane and centralizes the control plane of all devices, facilitating the controlling of the entire network through a single portal. This helps us create flexible network architectures that can be reconfigured quickly to fit different needs. However, centralizing control leads to a Single Point of Failure and makes the network vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks, which is one of the major reasons why industries are reluctant to adopt this technology. Blockchain provides us a with a distributed ledger and a decentralized state, allowing us to create decentralized applications that run over multiple computers. This research aims to distribute the control plane of Software Defined Networks across multiple devices using blockchain. This addresses the existing security vulnerabilities of the Software Defined Network architecture such as Single Point of Failure while continuing to keep the control plane logically centralized, thereby allowing the network to be configured through a single portal. The resulting architecture has a physically distributed control plane whose logic is centralized.

Tomoyuki Morimae

The posthoc verification protocol [J. F. Fitzsimons, M. Hajdu{\v s}ek, and T. Morimae, Physical Review Letters {\bf120}, 040501 (2018)] enables an information-theoretically-sound non-interactive verification of quantum computing, but the message from the prover to the verifier is quantum and the verifier has to do single-qubit measurements. The Mahadev protocol removes these quantum parts, but the soundness becomes the computational one. In this paper, we construct an information-theoretically-sound non-interactive classical verification protocol for quantum computing with a trusted center. The trusted center sends random BB84 states to the prover, and the classical descriptions of these BB84 states to the verifier. The messages from the center to the prover and the verifier are independent of the instance. By slightly modifying our protocol, we also construct a non-interactive statistical zero-knowledge proof system for QMA with the trusted center.

Cem Kartal

Bitcoin en popüler ve yaygın olarak kullanılan dijital para birimidir. Bu nedenle, Bitcoin fiyat hareketinin tahmini finansal piyasalar için büyük önem taşımaktadır. Bitcoin fiyat tahmininde ekonometrik modellerin yanında veri madenciliği yöntemlerinden de faydalanılmaktadır. Veri madenciliğinde kullanılan araç ve yöntemler yardımıyla veriler modellenerek yararlanılacak bilgilere dönüştürülürler. K-Star algoritması veri madenciliği, obje tanımlama ve kontrol sistemleri gibi birçok alanda kullanılmakta olan örnek tabanlı bir yaklaşımdır. Bu çalışmada Makroekonomik değişkenlerin Bitcoin fiyatlarını etkileme seviyeleri, Makine Öğrenme yöntemlerinden Lazy Learning Öğrenmeye Dayalı K-Star Algoritması kullanılarak analiz edilmiştir. Çalışmanın veri seti, bağımlı ve bağımsız değişkenlerin 3 Ocak 2017 - 30 Ocak 2019 yılları arasındaki iş günü bazında 510 adet gözlem değerini içermektedir. Bu gözlemlerin 474 adedi (%93’ü) algoritmanın modellenmesi (eğitim) için, 36 adedi (%7’si) ise sınıflandırma (test) için kullanılmıştır. Modelin Bitcoin fiyatlarını gelecek dönem “yükseliş” mi yoksa “düşüş” mü göstereceğine ilişkin sınıflandırma başarısının %61,1 oranında olduğu, Bitcoin fiyatlarının “yükseliş” göstereceğine ilişkin doğru sınıflandırma başarısının %71,42, “düşüş” göstereceğine ilişkin doğru sınıflandırma başarısının ise %46,66 olduğu tespit edilmiştir. Sonuç olarak Makine Öğrenme Tekniğinin belli bir performans gösterdiği ancak Bitcoin fiyatlarının öngörülebilirliğinin henüz beklentinin altında olduğu ortaya çıkmıştır.

Yuta Nakamura, Yuanyu Zhang, Masahiro Sasabe, Shoji Kasahara

Due to the rapid penetration of the Internet of Things (IoT) into human life, illegal access to IoT resources (e.g., data and actuators) has greatly threatened our safety. Access control, which specifies who (i.e., subjects) can access what resources (i.e., objects) under what conditions, has been recognized as an effective solution to address this issue. To cope with the distributed and trust-less nature of IoT systems, we propose a decentralized and trustworthy Capability-Based Access Control (CapBAC) scheme by using the Ethereum smart contract technology. In this scheme, a smart contract is created for each object to store and manage the capability tokens (i.e., data structures recording granted access rights) assigned to the related subjects, and also to verify the ownership and validity of the tokens for access control. Different from previous schemes which manage the tokens in units of subjects, i.e., one token per subject, our scheme manages the tokens in units of access rights or actions, i.e., one token per action. Such novel management achieves more fine-grained and flexible capability delegation and also ensures the consistency between the delegation information and the information stored in the tokens. We implemented the proposed CapBAC scheme in a locally constructed Ethereum blockchain network to demonstrate its feasibility. In addition, we measured the monetary cost of our scheme in terms of gas consumption to compare our scheme with the existing Blockchain-Enabled Decentralized Capability-Based Access Control (BlendCAC) scheme proposed by other researchers. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the BlendCAC scheme in terms of the flexibility, granularity, and consistency of capability delegation at almost the same monetary cost.

Xingjian Ding, Jianxiong Guo, Deying Li, Weili Wu

The world-changing blockchain technique provides a novel method to establish a secure, trusted and decentralized system for solving the security and personal privacy problems in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. The mining process in blockchain requires miners to solve a proof-of-work puzzle, which requires high computational power. However, the lightweight IIoT devices cannot directly participate in the mining process due to the limitation of power and computational resources. The edge computing service makes it possible for IIoT applications to build a blockchain network, in which IIoT devices purchase computational resources from edge servers and thus can offload their computational tasks. The amount of computational resource purchased by IIoT devices depends on how many profits they can get in the mining process, and will directly affect the security of the blockchain network. In this paper, we investigate the incentive mechanism for the blockchain platform to attract IIoT devices to purchase more computational power from edge servers to participate in the mining process, thereby building a more secure blockchain network. We model the interaction between the blockchain platform and IIoT devices as a two-stage Stackelberg game, where the blockchain platform act as the leader, and IIoT devices act as followers. We analyze the existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium, and propose an efficient algorithm to compute the Stackelberg equilibrium point. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of our algorithm through extensive simulations, and analyze the strategies of blockchain platform and IIoT devices under different situations.

Raja Jurdak, Ali Dorri, Mahinda Vilathgamuwa

The rapid growth in distributed energy sources on power grids leads to increasingly decentralised energy management systems for the prediction of power supply and demand and the dynamic setting of an energy price signal. Within this emerging smart grid paradigm, electric vehicles can serve as consumers, transporters, and providers of energy through two-way charging stations, which highlights a critical feedback loop between the movement patterns of these vehicles and the state of the energy grid. This paper proposes a vision for an Internet of Mobile Energy (IoME), where energy and information flow seamlessly across the power and transport sectors to enhance the grid stability and end user welfare. We identify the key challenges of trust, scalability, and privacy, particularly location and energy linking privacy for EV owners, for realising the IoME vision. We propose an information architecture for IoME that uses scalable blockchain to provide energy data integrity and authenticity, and introduces one-time keys for public EV transactions and a verifiable anonymous trip extraction method for EV users to share their trip data while protecting their location privacy. We present an example scenario that details the seamless and closed loop information flow across the energy and transport sectors, along with a blockchain design and transaction vocabulary for trusted decentralised transactions. We finally discuss the open challenges presented by IoME that can unlock significant benefits to grid stability, innovation, and end user welfare.

Yuan Lu, Qiang Tang, Guiling Wang

With the rapid popularity of blockchain, decentralized human intelligence tasks (HITs) are proposed to crowdsource human knowledge without relying on vulnerable third-party platforms. However, the inherent limits of blockchain cause decentralized HITs to face a few "new" challenges. For example, the confidentiality of solicited data turns out to be the sine qua non, though it was an arguably dispensable property in the centralized setting. To ensure the "new" requirement of data privacy, existing decentralized HITs use generic zero-knowledge proof frameworks (e.g. SNARK), but scarcely perform well in practice, due to the inherently expensive cost of generality. We present a practical decentralized protocol for HITs, which also achieves the fairness between requesters and workers. At the core of our contributions, we avoid the powerful yet highly-costly generic zk-proof tools and propose a special-purpose scheme to prove the quality of encrypted data. By various non-trivial statement reformations, proving the quality of encrypted data is reduced to efficient verifiable decryption, thus making decentralized HITs practical. Along the way, we rigorously define the ideal functionality of decentralized HITs and then prove the security due to the ideal-real paradigm. We further instantiate our protocol to implement a system called Dragoon, an instance of which is deployed atop Ethereum to facilitate an image annotation task used by ImageNet. Our evaluations demonstrate its practicality: the on-chain handling cost of Dragoon is even less than the handling fee of Amazon's Mechanical Turk for the same ImageNet HIT.

Peter Roosenboom, Tom van der Kolk, Abe de Jong

We analyse the determinants of success for 630 ICOs undertaken from August 2015 up until the end of December 2017, a period in which the market for ICOs grew to an unprecented level. We find evidence that ICOs are more successful in raising funding when they disclose more information to investors (i.e. have a higher profile rating), have a higher quality rating by cryptocurrency experts, have a pre-ICO GitHub repository, organise a presale, refrain from offering bonus schemes, have shorter planned token sale durations and have a larger project team. ICOs that disclose more information to investors and that have a higher quality rating at the time of the campaign show stronger ex-post performance. Longer-term project success is positively impacted by having a pre-ICO GitHub repository, a shorter planned token sale duration and having a larger project team at the time of the ICO, although these results depend on the ex-post success measure used. We conclude that for entrepreneurs it is important to make an ICO as transparent as possible and that profile and expert ratings are a valuable means to overcome the information asymmetry problems associated with token sales.