UBC Theses and Dissertations

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UBC Theses and Dissertations

A database of initial coin offering projects Tong, Jinfeng

Abstract

In the recent few years, as a potential digital currency to partially supersede fiat currency, Bitcoin has swept the world. As the technology that supports Bitcoin, blockchain has attracted significant interests from researchers and the general public. Blockchain has the potential to be applied to multiple fields ranging from cryptocurrencies, financial services to distributed storage systems. In order to support the development of projects based on blockchain, funds are raised through a mechanism called intial coin offering (ICO). More than 18 billion USD has been raised through ICOs to develop new projects based on blockchain and at least 2,000 ICOs have been launched since 2014. Although some studies have been conducted to analyze these blockchain projects and ICOs, there is still no comprehensive database of these projects with classifications or annotations. To fill this gap, I constructed a new database of blockchain projects called “ICOWD (Initial Coin Offering White Paper Database)” in this thesis. ICOWD includes 1,533 white papers. I also classify the white papers in different aspects by providing four annotations that are usage of tokens, application fields of the ICOs, scale of technical writing, and token utility. Hopefully, the database may save time for persons who want to conduct researches on ICO projects. The annotations of ICO projects may help researchers have better understanding of the white papers. Finally, an example is provided to illustrate how the database can be utilized. Different text classification techniques are applied to annotations to build automatic recognition systems. The automatic system can partially recognize the categories of white papers with a limited number of white papers as samples from the database.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International