THE INITIAL COIN OFFERING – CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Abstract

The research objective of the article: The aim of the paper is to present the challenges and opportunities of Initial Coin Offering (ICO) procedure (sometimes appearing in literature and official documents as the Initial Token Offering (ITO)) from the point of view of a company as well as verify the hypothesis about ICO as a cheap form of capital rising that is often presented in websites dedicated to ICO. There are enumerated the differences and similarities to the Initial Public Offering and possible advantages over other methods of capital rising. The paper points out the most important barriers to the use of ICO. The research method applied: As there is shortage of available research papers and literature related to the topic that are focused on financial aspects such as comparison between ICO and other methods of capital rising, there was conducted the analysis of reliable internet sources and a case study method of Ethereum – the first company that applied the Initial Coin Offering procedure. The mentioned research method has its limits, as it is necessary to verify received information. That is the reason why only professional websites dedicated to the topic were used. The outcome of the research (considerations, analyses), main conclusion(s): the Initial Coin Offering procedure is recognised as a very controversial topic. It is clearly visible that ICO has many advantages over traditional forms of rising capital for the company, but, so far, ambiguous legal status, cost level and high risk of scams and other possible abuses make it difficult to become widely applied by newly created companies.