ICO Evaluation Websites Analysis

Lunesu M. I.;Desogus O.

2020-01-01

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Abstract

The evaluation websites of ICO (Initial coin offering) a way to raise funds for creating a new coin, app, or service launches, represent the main source where investors can find interesting information about their investments on one or more ICOs. In the last years many websites offered the possibility to evaluate ICOs. Among all, we chose 8 significant websites where rating, team, socials, platform, country and many other properties are shown for each ICO. These properties can be very helpful to figure out whether an ICO might be a good opportunity or a scam. Analyzing data found on ICOBench website using APIs, we found the same data for 7 other websites using the scraper. Then, we compared the gathered data in order to be able to define the quality of the evaluation websites regarding completeness and clarity of the shown information, finding several differences in rating parameters and ICO distribution. For this purpose we developed an ad-hoc scraping tool to collect in a common data structure the information shown in each website. Thanks to the data obtained with the tool we made interesting analysis, showing the differences between the ICO parameters of the different websites and defining completeness and clarity of the information.