Mr Nishanth Bhimireddy

Research project: Investigation of social media sentiment's influence on initial coin offerings (ICOs).

Abstract

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are an innovation developed to raise funds through crowd of investors over internet leveraging blockchain and smart contracts. ICOs raise funds in exchange for tokens. One of the innovations of ICOs is the ability to raise large amount of money in short time with low transaction costs and without the need of trusted central authorities or middlemen. Twitter is one of the social networks used by these ventures to communicate project details to public and create an interest about venture. Further public uses twitter to post opinions on various ICO projects using hashtags. We use sentiment analysis to see if opinions (positive or negative) expressed on Twitter before an ICO's end date have an impact on the amount of money raised. The implication of this study is that tweets made by public can represent public perception towards an ICO before the completion of token sale.