Big Reward for Risk in Initial Coin Offerings?

Should investors pursue initial coin offerings (ICO), special-purpose crypto-tokens? In their May 2018 paper entitled “Digital Tulips? Returns to Investors in Initial Coin Offerings”, Hugo Benedetti and Leonard Kostovetsky study the market for crypto-tokens, focusing on: initial pricing; returns from buying at ICO and selling at date of listing on an exchange; and, returns from buying at listing date and holding for various fixed intervals. ICOs typically originate with an offeror’s prospectus detailing a goal, plan, team and offering schedule. Interested parties then register for the offering, with execution typically in stages over several months, some restricted to preferred users, angel investors, venture capitalists and/or accredited investors. The authors also employ Twitter accounts of ICO offerors to test the relationship between Twitter activity and price and to measure post-ICO attrition rate of offerors. Using data for 2,390 ICOs completed by May 2018, including offeror Twitter histories as of May 8, 2018, they find that:

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