Initial Coin Offering (ICO) evaluation model

High-tech companies operating in the field of blockchain technology use the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise start-up capital. It is a fairly new, non-standardized and poorly regulated way of collecting start-up funding that can bring high yields to investors in the short term, but investors also have to be ready to take on high risks. The purpose of this article is to define a decision model for the evaluation of ICO projects, which provides a systematic, transparent, methodological approach to making decisions on investing in them. For that purpose, the authors analyzed a number of factors, which directly or indirectly influence the successful implementation of ICO projects, and the researchers extracted the most important among them (model parameters). In order to build the decision model, used a qualitative method for the hierarchical multi-parameter evaluation of DEX, which using symbolic parameters and combining functions in the form of if-then rules ensures the most freely and flexible combining assessment parameters into a uniform model. In the article, the use of proposed decision model was tested in practice on multiple ICO processes. The article details the decision-making process in the case of CargoX, and also summarizes the results of the evaluation of ICOs Tokens.net, BitClave, Neuromation and WePower