Before the launch of the platform, the entity issues the tokens at a certain price and uses the proceeds of the sale as an alternative funding to finance the platform development (Chuen et al. 2017; Ehrsam 2016a). The issuing entity promotes the token sale with the prospect of an increase of the token value.

The entity behind the platforms issues its own blockchain-enabled token (Bachmann et al. 2019; Fridgen et al. 2018; Lee et al. 2018). So far, various token designs enable different applications. One token type is the “utility token”, which represents the right to access the offered products or services on the platform (ICOscoring 2018). In the blockchain context, we refer to this representation as tokenization (Dale 2018).