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The task team would like to thank ECORYS Nederland B.V. and ICRA Management Consulting Services Limited (IMaCS), who were engaged for carrying out data collection, analysis, case studies and developing a major part of this study report. The task team highly appreciates support from Mssrs.

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Using the market for initial coin offerings (ICOs) as a laboratory, we provide evidence that entrepreneurs use retention to alleviate information asymmetry. The underlying technology and the absence of regulation make the ICO market well suited to study this question empirically. Using a hand-collected data set, we show that ICO issuers that retain a larger fraction of their tokens are more successful in their funding efforts and are more likely to develop a working product. Moreover, we find that retention is a stronger signal when markets are crowded, and investors do not have as much time to conduct due diligence. This paper was accepted by Will Cong, Special Issue of Management Science: Blockchains and crypto economics. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4631 .