Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/275034 
Year of Publication: 
2022
Citation: 
[Journal:] Journal of Risk and Financial Management [ISSN:] 1911-8074 [Volume:] 15 [Issue:] 12 [Article No.:] 557 [Year:] 2022 [Pages:] 1-21
Publisher: 
MDPI, Basel
Abstract: 
The landscape of ICOs and its underlying Blockchain technology needs more clarity, given that several overlapping and opposing views exist from governmental institutions, institutional investors, economists, and academia. Those positions stem from confusion, bias, and vested interest. Having consensus from the pioneer entrepreneurs who define Blockchain technology usage, and its marketplace address this need. Furthermore, an agreement on the problems blockchain is solving from the industry perspective would further the understanding of the technology direction and its "raison d'être." or "reason of existence". The paper analyzes 4367 businesses that requested funding using ICO whitepapers and raising more than $20 billion US dollars during the most active ICO period. Using Latent Semantic Analyses (LSA), the paper identifies a one-factor solution that explains 98.15% of all ICOs. The paper conducts a second-order analysis that generates an 18-factor solution. Through the empirical analysis, the paper presents its findings as an ICO marketplace stacked layer model. The model is comprised of four layers: (1) Trust; (2) Value exchange; (3) Automation; and (4) Applications to enable value exchange, and an era of new business models. The paper then presents an unbiased, unified entrepreneurial definition of the Blockchain technology usage.
Subjects: 
cryptocurrencies
blockchain
entrepreneurial finance
initial coin offering (ICO)
latent semantic analyses (LSA)
natural language processing (NLP)
peer-to-peer networks (P2P)
value exchange
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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