This study explores the determinants of initial coin offering (ICO) success, where success is defined as the amount of capital a project could raise. ICOs are a tool for startups in the blockchain ecosystem to raise early capital with relative ease. The market for ICOs has grown at a rapid pace...

Although online poker is a gold mine of data, until now nobody knows where the players and their money come from. It seems that the knowledge about the online poker market has not been able to keep up with the speed of its evolution in the past years. This paper is the first to shed light on...

$1.6 billion criminal proceedings are transferred yearly into the legal system by money laundering (UNODC 2011). Only about 0.2% are identified and confiscated. The manifold negative consequences of money laundering are devastating and threaten the functionality of capital markets (Unger 2007)....

With ownership estimates of up to 25%, Turkey is at the forefront of cryptocurrency adoption rendering it an interesting example to study the proclaimed use cases of cryptocurrencies. Using exploratory factor analysis based on a sample of 745 Turkish cryptocurrency owners, we identify three...

Bitcoin runs on energy. The decentralized network’s amount of energy consumption has resulted in multifaceted discussions about its efficiency and environmental impact. To put Bitcoin’s energy consumption into perspective, we propose to relate (a) the energy consumption in TWh and (b)...

Electronic gambling offers the opportunity to analyze huge and unbiased data sets of automatically recorded actual gambling behavior. This study refers to data on 2,127,887 poker playing identities from the Online Poker Database of the University of Hamburg (OPD‐UHH) to analyze three subgroups...

Blockchain-based security token offerings (STOs) provide a new way of crowdfunding and corporate financing. Building on signalling theory, this paper examines 1) whether companies conducting an STO make use of cheap signals to influence investment behaviour and 2) if such use of cheap signals is...

For most purposes of technical analysis, valuation metrics and many other relevant financial methods, the price of the last transaction is considered representative of the market price. The straightforward argument is that at this price, supply and demand have last met. However, on closer...

Cryptocurrency markets are often deemed inefficient. This paper explores how the market reacts to a specific form of public information: large Bitcoin transactions. The event study examines the price effects of 2,132 transactions involving at least 500 Bitcoins over the period September 2018 to...