Abstract
An ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is an innovative way to fund projects based on blockchain. The funding is based on the selling of tokens by means of decentralized applications called smart contracts written in Solidity, a programming language specific for Ethereum blockchain. The ICOs work in a volatile context and it is crucial that the team is capable of handling constant changes. The Agile methods, proven practices enabling to develop software in presence of changing requirements, could be a means for managing uncertainty. The main goals of this work are to understand software engineering activities related to ICOs, recognize the ICOs developed using Agile methods, and make a comparison between ICOs and Agile ICOs. In addition, we perform a deeper analysis of Agile ICOs concerning project planning, software development, and code features. Our work shows that the roles of the people involved in an ICO can be compared to the typical roles of the SCRUM methodology. The majority of Agile ICOs use tool of testing before storing smart contract on blockchain. Finally, the application of volumetric and complexity software metrics shows that the files of Agile ICOs is on average shorter and less complex than in other smart contracts.
Highlights
An Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) (Initial Coin Offering) is a new way to perform crowdfunding campaigns, based on blockchain technology like Bitcoin and Etherum [1,2,3]
We focused on their main features, such as: The team size and roles in order to understand if its composition is consistent with the best known software development methodologies; the rating provided by ICObench in order to investigate the projects quality; the use of social media in order to discover if ICOs teams believe that the communication with investors and their feedback are important; the financial aspects related to motivating the people involved in an ICO
We report the comparison between our results with the results provided by [45], related to more than 12,000 smart contracts published on the blockchain explorer Etherscan and deployed on the Ethereum blockchain until January 2018
Summary
An ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is a new way to perform crowdfunding campaigns, based on blockchain technology like Bitcoin and Etherum [1,2,3]. The research presented in this paper aims primarily at understanding the main software development characteristics of ICO startups, from the planning phase to the testing phase, taking into consideration the quality of code. To this purpose, we analyzed the whole set of ICOs gathered from ICObench (available at http://icobench.com) and registered between August 2015 and 20 February 2018. We focused on their main features, such as: The team size and roles in order to understand if its composition is consistent with the best known software development methodologies; the rating provided by ICObench in order to investigate the projects quality; the use of social media in order to discover if ICOs teams believe that the communication with investors and their feedback are important; the financial aspects related to motivating the people involved in an ICO
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