Management decisions regarding innovative projects at their early stages of development: An example of a methodology for assessing crypto projects

The purpose of this article is to analyze the effect that halving has on the fair market value of bitcoins. The main hypothesis of the study is that the decline in the cost of miners’ remuneration for mining is a significant factor that affects the price of cryptocurrencies. The article examines the factors that regulate the issuing process. The significance of a limited supply of bitcoin is detailed in the article, as well as the mechanism for the implementation of the issue of new bitcoins. The study compares the historical inflation data of the US dollar and the projected data on the inflation of bitcoin. The article analyzes the main technical element of cryptocurrency – halving – when the miner’s reward is halved. This analysis includes the mathematical methods of statistical data processing. Research results show that reducing remuneration by half every four years leads to an increased market value of the cryptocurrency. This relationship is clearly illustrated by the Kendall rank correlation method. The results of the study can have a significant impact on the fundamental assessment of bitcoin and can also enable investors to assess any of the existing and operating cryptocurrencies according to this method.

High-tech companies operating in the field of blockchain technology use the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise start-up capital. It is a fairly new, non-standardized and poorly regulated way of collecting start-up funding that can bring high yields to investors in the short term, but investors also have to be ready to take on high risks. The purpose of this article is to define a decision model for the evaluation of ICO projects, which provides a systematic, transparent, methodological approach to making decisions on investing in them. For that purpose, the authors analyzed a number of factors, which directly or indirectly influence the successful implementation of ICO projects, and the researchers extracted the most important among them (model parameters). In order to build the decision model, used a qualitative method for the hierarchical multi-parameter evaluation of DEX, which using symbolic parameters and combining functions in the form of if-then rules ensures the most freely and flexible combining assessment parameters into a uniform model. In the article, the use of proposed decision model was tested in practice on multiple ICO processes. The article details the decision-making process in the case of CargoX, and also summarizes the results of the evaluation of ICOs Tokens.net, BitClave, Neuromation and WePower.

The emergence of Bitcoin in 2009 has received considerable attention surrounding the validity of cryptocurrencies as a viable and, in some jurisdictions, a legal currency alternative. Despite widespread concern that these cryptocurrencies are fostering the environment within which a substantial bubble can occur, it is important to analyze whether these new assets are behaving similarly to major international currencies. This paper investigates the effects of international monetary policy changes on bitcoin returns using a GARCH (1.1) estimation model. The results indicate that monetary policy decisions based on interest rates taken by the Federal Open Market Committee in the United States significantly impact upon bitcoin returns. After controlling for international effects, we find significant evidence of volatility effects driven by United States, European Union, United Kingdom and Japanese quantitative easing announcements. These results show that, despite its nature and ideals, bitcoin seems to be subject to the same economic factors as traditional fiat currencies, and is not entirely unaffected by government policies. This result has implications for investors using bitcoin as a hedging or diversification tool. In addition, we contribute to the existing debate regarding the classification of bitcoin as an asset class, by illustrating that bitcoin volatility exhibits various reactions that bear resemblance to both currency pairs and store-of-value assets.