Much like initial public offerings produce publicly traded securities, Initial Coin Offerings (icos) produce crypto tokens tradeable on crypto exchanges. Despite an apparent need for investor protection the ico and the tokenisation phenomenon have yet to be addressed by legislative action on the...

This paper explores how entrepreneurs can use initial coin offerings -- whereby they issue crypto tokens and commit to accept only those tokens as payment for their products -- to fund venture start-up costs. We show that the ICO mechanism allows entrepreneurs to generate buyer competition for...