Abstract Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are unregulated offerings of digital tokens on the Internet, built on the blockchain technology, as to provide a means to collect finance for a project, disintermediating any external platform, payment agent or professional investor. ICO proponents are usually teams made up by entrepreneurs, professionals, technicians and managers, eventually assisted by an advisory committee. In this work, we analyse the determinants of the characteristics of the advisory board and using different centrality and connectedness measures from social network analysis, we analyse the relationship with the ICO fundraising success. We find that larger and more experienced teams are more likely to appoint a committee of advisors and its presence is significantly correlated with the ICO success. Different facets of the ICO centrality in the advisors’ network are associated to different effects. We find a U-shaped relationship between the number of advisors’ connections, their capability to act as ‘bridges’ in the network and the ICO success; we also find that, in order to raise larger amount of money, it is important to hire advisors which are linked to ‘well-connected’ advisors in other ICOs and are more closely linked to all other nodes in the network.

中文翻译：

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顾问在首次代币发行成功中的核心作用

摘要初始代币发行（ICO）是基于区块链技术构建的互联网上不受监管的数字代币发行，旨在为项目筹集资金，分离任何外部平台，支付代理或专业投资者提供一种手段。ICO的支持者通常是由企业家，专业人士，技术人员和管理人员组成的团队，最终由咨询委员会协助。在这项工作中，我们分析了咨询委员会特征的决定因素，并使用来自社交网络分析的不同集中性和联系性度量，分析了与ICO筹款成功的关系。我们发现，规模更大，经验更丰富的团队更有可能任命一个顾问委员会，委员会的存在与ICO的成功密切相关。顾问网络中ICO中心性的不同方面具有不同的影响。我们发现顾问之间的连接数量，他们在网络中充当“桥梁”的能力与ICO成功之间存在U型关系。我们还发现，为了筹集更多资金，重要的是聘请顾问，这些顾问与其他ICO中“连接良好”的顾问链接，并且与网络中的所有其他节点更紧密地联系。