Initial coin offerings and ESG: Allies or enemies?

Initial Coin Offerings (aka ICOs) have gained a prominent interest in the FinTech world as an alternative way to fundraising for innovative and cutting-edge business ideas. So far, academics have studied drivers of success without posing specific attention to the products or activities proposed by the ICOs. In this paper, we investigate the possible nexus between ICOs and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) indicators, by studying a set of 871 ICOs. Specifically, we extract keywords related to ESG from whitepapers associated with each ICO using neural networks language models and build a variable which acts as a signal of attention to sustainability topics. Our research hypothesis concerns the evaluation of whether ICOs oriented towards ESG are more likely to successfully raise expected funds. Preliminary results confirm such a hypothesis.