Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs

This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc

Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs

This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc

ICObench ratings and Initial Coin Offerings’ success

Initial coin offerings (ICOs)–commonly referred to as token sales or token offerings– are assisted by blockchain technology. This financing tool helps entrepreneurs finance early-stage ventures on a decentralized, global scale. Researchers have previously called for more research to be carried out vis-à-vis the role of information intermediaries in the ICO ecosystem. The main goal of this study was to analyze the correlation between ICO ratings and the financing success of ICOs. As a result, secondary microdata on 5,581 ICOs were collected from the ICObench website. The results reveal that ICO ratings issued by third parties have a positive influence on the fundraising campaign of these offerings. ICO ratings thus appear to function as an effective signal to buyers and to reduce information asymmetry between sellers and investors.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Token Economy – Towards Building a Sustainable Blockchain Token Ecosystem Framework

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementIn the context of the internet’s historical trajectory, blockchain technology represents a significant paradigm shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. Web 2.0, the current world of the interactive and social web, is an internet siloed by centralized organizations that provide services in exchange for personal data. Web 3.0, on the other hand, is based on cryptographic blockchain technology and enables an economic institutional infrastructure that is natively available on the web, hands ownership back to the creators and users and operates without an intermediary. Blockchain tokens enable digital scarcity and a novel internet-native value transfer mechanism. Tokens can have a magnitude of different use cases ranging from serving as unit of account (currency), promoting usage incentive, as tool for governance, representation of ownership or as a funding instrument. The research field of token creation is still in its very infant stage and a lot of blockchain project launches still happen without proper structure and long term strategy – leading to suboptimal and short lasting results. Based on the Design Science Research methodology, this dissertation attempts to design a holistic conceptual framework that can serve as a base for a decision aid for organizations when creating a blockchain token ecosystem. This artifact will finally be evaluated by domain experts to ensure proper correctness

Blockchain-Based Token Sales, Initial Coin Offerings, and the Democratization of Public Capital Markets

Best known for their role in the creation of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, blockchains are revolutionizing the way technology entrepreneurs finance their business enterprises. In 2017 alone, tech entrepreneurs raised over $6 billion through the sale of blockchain-based digital tokens, with some sales lasting mere seconds before selling out. In a token sale, also referred to as an “initial coin offering” or “ICO,” organizers of a project sell digital tokens to members of the public to finance the development of new technological platforms and services. After the initial sale, cryptocurrency exchanges scattered across the globe list tokens for trading and facilitate an active secondary market in which wild price fluctuations are common. The recent explosion of token sales could mark the beginning of a broader shift in public capital markets. Blockchains drastically reduce the cost of exchanging value and enable anyone to transmit digitized assets around the globe in a highly trusted manner, stoking dreams of truly global capital markets that leverage the power of a blockchain and the Internet to facilitate capital formation. Lacking homogeneity, the status of tokens under U.S. securities laws is unclear. Although the SEC recently issued a Report of Investigation and has initiated several enforcement actions in which it has found that tokens are securities, confusion still surrounds the boundaries between the types of tokens that will be treated as securities and those that will not. In this Article, we argue that the SEC and Congress should provide token sellers and the exchanges that facilitate token sales with additional regulatory certainty and a sensible path to compliance. Specifically, we outline extrinsic and intrinsic factors that courts and regulators should consider when applying the Howey test to digital tokens, adoption of which would help resolve the uncertainty surrounding tokens that mix aspects of consumption and use with the potential for profit. We further propose that lawmakers adopt both a compliance-driven safe harbor for online exchanges that list tokens with a reasonable belief that the public sale of such tokens is not a violation of section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933 as well as an exemption to the section 5 registration requirement that has been tailored to digital tokens

Novel approaches for managing platform-based ecosystems

Digitalization challenges existing organizations and industries. The associated advancement changes the way organizations and their customers interact. This has increasingly fostered the emergence of platforms to facilitate such interaction. Online platforms are software or hardware infrastructures that serve as a foundation and facilitate the interaction between multiple parties (e.g., between organizations and users). Organizations create platforms as part of a larger ecosystem. One major challenge concerns the design of platform-based ecosystems so all participants benefit from their participation. The management of associated relationships with other ecosystem participants is consequently a key challenge and demands according foresight. Platform-based ecosystems are subject to research in the field of information systems. Thus, scientific literature addresses many corresponding research questions and provides valuable insights for both research and practice. However, organizations face numerous challenges when engaging in ecosystems. Such challenges are, e.g., to develop new ecosystems, to incentivize participants to participate in the ecosystem, to cooperate with other participants, and to monitor the ecosystem. In this respect, this doctoral thesis provides a brief overview of platform-based ecosystems and the respective participants therein. Further, the thesis addresses four key challenges in the context of platform-based ecosystems, and proposes novel approaches in order to overcome the challenges. The basis for the novel approaches stems from five research papers. The first and second research paper address the challenge of determining design options when developing new ecosystems via blockchain-enabled initial coin offerings. The papers feature a taxonomy and derive predominant archetypes by drawing on real-world cases. The third research paper addresses the challenge of incentivizing users to participate in platform-based ecosystems. The paper proposes an approach to model financial incentives concerning platform adoption. The fourth research paper proposes an approach to analyze organizational cooperation patterns for the purpose of innovation integration. The developed approach incorporates taxonomy development and enables organizations to determine cooperation characteristics to align the cooperation decision with the cooperation objectives. The fifth research paper addresses the challenge of monitoring customer sentiment on online platforms. The proposed design science research artefact includes a detector of negative sentiment such that organizations are able to identify when a negative sentiment develops, and intervene before users spread the sentiment, e.g., through comments. Each research paper answers a stand-alone research question in the realm of platform-based ecosystems and derives a theoretically founded and separately evaluated research artefact. The artefacts draw on underlying, well-established research methods that allow answering the respective problem statements. Since the problem statements are motived in a practical context, this thesis bridges the gap between a practically oriented problem and a theoretically founded solution. As a result, the derived insights contain a contribution for both, research in the field of Information Systems and practice audience, and encourage the engagement of both domains

Cryptocurrency functioning in the global economy

The article reveals a conceptual basis of the cryptocurrency functioning. The main types of cryptocurrencies are featured and analyzed as well as their general strengths and weaknesses. Based on the price dynamics correlation analysis of some cryptocurrency types, a general low level of dependence between digital assets is established. The main functions of the cryptocurrency are formulated in the form of transformed money functions. Also, additional functions of cryptocurrencies are defined on the basis of their innovative nature, as well as the role in the modern financial system and world economic relations