Identifying Factors that Affect Success of Initial Coin Offering (ICO)

Subject. Recently, there has been an increasing tendency in project fundraising through innovative methods of financing, such as ICO – the Initial Coin Offering. In these conditions, it is important to identify factors affecting the investment attractiveness of ICO projects, both for academic and business purposes, as this will provide investors and projects with information about today successful projects’ features. Goal. In this paper, we aim to identify factors that have a statistically significant impact on the projects’ success. Methods. This study is based on the ICORating Agency data. The following groups of factors are checked: financial and non-financial details of the ICO, as well as risk factors and availability of information about the project. As a research method, we use the construction of binomial logistic regressions with checking the accuracy with 5-block cross-validation. Results. In this work, with the use of econometric modeling, the success factors of ICO projects were identified. The project, which received funding and was published on the stock exchange, is recognized as successful. It is revealed that the success of projects is in direct proportion to the product t, the presence of a legal entity, the price of the token, the total issue and the average number of pages in social networks. At the same time, the availability of the product-application, the introduction of country restrictions for the participants, the indication of the planned budget, the presence of a minimum financial goal and the possibility of exchanging tokens for Fiat have a negative impact on the success of the project.