“…The database was built through an API accessible with a premium subscription to the ICO Bench website and comprises 556 projects in the banking/financial sector. This sector was selected due to the impacts it faces from the rise of Fintech companies (Kou et al 2021 ) and its role as a third party that is challenged by new models, such as ICOs (Frizzo-Barker et al 2019 ; Campino et al 2020 ). The database contains several key pieces of information on ICO projects: (i) information on the project itself, namely, the project’s year, information on the whitepaper, project ratings, and location; (ii) information on the campaign, namely, financing threshold amounts, the existence of bonus schemes or pre-sales of tokens; (iii) information on the team, namely, the number of team members, the number of advisors, and the number of projects, in which each member has participated; (iv) information on the use of social media, namely, which social media is used by the project and by the promoters.…”