  Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) are public offers of new cryptocurrencies in
exchange of existing ones, aimed to finance projects in the blockchain
development arena. In the last 8 months of 2017, the total amount gathered by
ICOs exceeded 4 billion US$, and overcame the venture capital funnelled toward
high tech initiatives in the same period. A high percentage of ICOS is managed
through Smart Contracts running on Ethereum blockchain, and in particular to
ERC-20 Token Standard Contract. In this work we examine 1388 ICOs, published on
December 31, 2017 on icobench.com Web site, gathering information relevant to
the assessment of their quality and software development management, including
data on their development teams. We also study, at the same date, the financial
data of 450 ICO tokens available on coinmarketcap.com Web site, among which 355
tokens are managed on Ethereum blochain. We define success criteria for the
ICOs, based on the funds actually gathered, and on the behavior of the price of
the related tokens, finding the factors that most likely influence the ICO
success likeliness.
