ABSTRACTS OF ARTICLES OF THE JOURNAL "INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES".
No. 10. Vol. 25. 2019

DOI: 10.17587/it.25.615-628

S. M. Avdoshin, PhD, Professor, Head of Software Engineering School, Faculty of Computer Science, HSE, savdoshin@hse.ru, D. D. Tsvetkov, PhD student, e-mail: dtsvetkov@hse.ru, National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE), Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation

Methodology for ICO Implementation

Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a new method of funds attraction by IT-projects that became especially popular in 2017—2018. Despite the decrease in the number of projects by 2019, the interest to ICO method is still high. Since, currently, methodological principles of initial coin offering are still insufficiently presented in scientific literature, the aim of the present article is to provide the general methodology for conducting initial coin offering, in the form of detailed description of its key steps. Primarily, in order to achieve the goals in the process of article preparation, the analysis of published scientific works in the scope of ICO was undertaken. Thereafter, blockchain projects having implemented ICO in the period from January 2013 to March 2019 were analyzed — both successful and high-quality ones, and failed ones. Among the analyzed projects there are: Mastercoin, Etherium, Waves, NEO, Nem, EOS,Stratis, Golos, Gnosis, Tron, KICKICO, Enigma, BitTorrent, TheDao, Tezos, CoinDash, OneCoin, Tithecoin, Nodio, SilberPfeil, Tingo and others. The result of the analysis is this article, where, based on ICO success criteria, confirmed by empirical research, and actual experience of the projects analyzed, the sequence of steps and actions, forming the basis of any ICO-campaign is provided. Moreover, the article provides specific practical recommendations that prevent possible errors on every step of initial coin offering implantation. The results obtained fill the gap in theoretical research on ICO methodology, and, furthermore can be useful at ICO organization in actuality of the market in 2019.
Keywords: ICO; crowdfunding; token; coin; white paper; cryptocurrency; blockchain; decentralization

P. 615–628

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