Managing Initial Coin Offerings: Towards a Taxonomy of ICO Processes

Abstract

Initial Coin Offerings are a new type of crowdbased fundraising mechanism that uses the blockchain to issue tokens to a crowd of people in exchange for funds that blockchain start-ups use to develop their business. Unfortunately, due to the recency of this new phenomenon, there is no systematic understanding of the ICO process and its underlying process characteristics. However, companies engaging in ICOs should be able to evaluate and choose the right process steps to best achieve their goal. Against this background, we develop a taxonomy for ICO processes. In contrast to previous work, this classification scheme focuses exclusively on the processual nature of ICOs and its underlying mechanisms.