From ICOs to INOs
from Part III - Capital Markets, Community, and Marketing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2024
Blockchain-based fundraising transforms the way issuers raise capital from the public, promising to reduce transaction costs, expand financial access, and reshape issuer-investor interactions. Despite these promises, the blockchain finance market is currently plagued by severe asymmetric information and is rife with fraudulent and low-quality issuers who exploit this friction. This chapter explores the reasons for the severe asymmetric information in this market and discusses the extent to which signaling and analysts can address it. It suggests that the effectiveness of signaling is limited due to the low costs of producing and disseminating signals and investors' inability to verify biased signals ex ante and punish biased signals ex post. These limitations make analysts a vital source for reducing asymmetric information but they, too, appear to suffer from significant problems – ranging from conflicts of interest to lack of transparency to low competence and expertise – which hinder their effectiveness in reducing asymmetric information. The chapter concludes with the policy implications arising from these observations, which can also guide policy-makers in addressing emerging blockchain-based fundraising mechanisms, such as non-fungible token (NFT) offerings.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.