Fear Sells: Determinants of Fund-Raising Success in the cross-section of Initial Coin Offerings

This paper explores cross-sectionally the determinants of ICO success as measured by the amount of raised funding. Our study is the first that retrieves an intensive hand-collected data library covering the entire population of all 5,033 ICOs launched in the 2014 – 2019 period. Another important novel aspect is that we address the question whether psychological and financial sentiment cached in whitepapers have an impact on the success of ICOs. We employ natural language procession tools and various sentiment dictionaries to assess the sentiment in whitepapers and our results suggest that ICO investors are largely guided by their emotions when making investment decisions. Additionally, to get a better understanding of the data, we implement Artificial Neural Networks. The present study supports this evidence, as we find that higher assessed riskiness of ICO projects does not lower the predicted amount of raised funding. Unlike documented in earlier literature, an unforeseen finding is the weak association between quality signals and readability of ICO whitepapers and ICO success.