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).

We pay in ether to use the network for running the smart contract powering the DApp.

Ethereum is the leading platform for initial coin offerings or ICOs. A project can use an ICO to raise millions of dollars, peer to peer from investors around the world.

. DApps are powered by smart contract software that automated the logic of a business agreement. DApps help cut out the middlemen. Bankers, brokers, lawyers and escrow agents are no longer needed really to guarantee the execution of an agreement.

Another intriguing cryptocurrency is Metronome. It is issued on the bitcoin network as well as on ethereum classic and others. What makes Metronome so interesting, is users can import and export it across chains. Such interoperability is a big challenge but it's also a big opportunity.

A cryptoasset is a digital asset that uses cryptography, a peer-to-peer network, and a public ledger to do three things: To regulate the creation of the units, to verify transactions and to secure these transactions without any middleman.

Digital currencies are secured using cryptography and combining that with their role as a currency gives us the compound word cryptocurrency.

A ring signature is created when the sender of a transaction is mixed together with a random collection of other IDs that basically serve as a decoy. This process produces a unique digital signature for the transaction, but it blurs the identity of the real sender.

Zero-knowledge proofs present the solution. The enterprise can prove it's the recipient of upcoming payments without revealing all the business details it may rightly want to keep private.

Another HD wallet solution to generate privacy is a so-called merge and re-split operation. In this example, several entities anonymously submit new addresses to a smart contract. The contract collects the same amount from each party, let's say it's 100 bitcoins each. Then the contract re-deploys the amount to the new addresses.

An HD wallet uses algorithms to create a new public-private key pair for each transaction or piece of a larger trade. This thus would allow a user to have a virtually infinite number of public addresses all derived from a single master seed phrase, making their identity difficult to trace.

A private blockchain still involves the record keeping of everyone's transactions by each node of this network.

, private blockchain. It's organized and controlled by a known and trusted consortium of entities, like say, banks.

Attribution requires knowledge of two facts: who holds the asset, and who has created it and is party to the contract.

Integrity is distributed among nodes, not vested in a single member.

Data on blockchains are different from data on the Internet, and in one important way in particular. On the Internet most of the information is malleable and fleeting. The exact date and time of its publication isn't critical to past or future information. On a blockchain, the truth of the present relies on the details of the past. Bitcoins moving across the network have been permanently stamped from the moment of their coinage.

money and other assets aren't like the other things you can share online. If you send a selfie to a friend, you can still share it with another. But you can't give your friend a dollar you've already given to someone else. The money must leave your account to go into your friend's. It can't exist in two places at once. If the Internet treated money just like information, there would be a risk if you're spending the same money twice.

Not all nodes are mining however. Most of the nodes on the Bitcoin network simply verify data

The computers connected to the blockchain network are known as nodes. Some nodes donate their processing power to solve a math problem associated with a new block. The Bitcoin community calls these people "miners,

With blockchain, trust comes from the network itself. Instead of simply trusting a middleman institution, we can trust the blockchain code. The way that the blockchain is built means all parties in the system, not just the ones involved in the transaction, come to an agreement on what the facts are. And once they agree, a new block is added

This validation process makes theft impossible by any practical measure. If you wanted to steal a bitcoin, you'd have to rewrite the coins' entire history on the block chain.

At its most basic, Blockchain is open-source code. Anyone can download it for free, run it, and use it to develop new tools for managing transactions online

A distributed ledger is a database existing in many places with many people using it. Not all distributed ledgers have the encryption and verification standards of a blockchain. A blockchain is a specific type of distributed ledger,

Bitcoin or other digital currency isn't saved in a file somewhere. Instead it's represented by transactions recorded on a blockchain.