Initial Coin Offerings Success Prediction Using Social Media and Large Language Models Khouloud Safi Eljil 1,2, *, Essia Hamouda 3 , and Farid Nait-Abdesselam 1 1 Computer Science Department, Université Paris Cité, France 2 Higher School of Communications, University of Carthage, SUP’COM, Tunisia 3 Department of Information and Decision Sciences, California State University San Bernardino, USA Email: khouloud.safi-eljil@etu.u-paris.fr (K.S.E.); essia.hamouda@csusb.edu (E.H.); farid.nait-abdesselam@u-paris.fr (F.N.-A.) *Corresponding author Abstract—Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a fundraising method utilized by blockchain startups to raise capital by issuing and selling digital tokens to investors. ICOs have become widely popular for cryptocurrency fundraising, often generating millions of dollars, and surpassing traditional crowdfunding methods like Initial Public Offerings. However, ICO is a risky way of investing and raising capital due to the lack of regulations and standardisation. In this research, we delve into the impact of social media and sentiment analysis on the success of ICOs, employing various machine learning models and Large Language Models. Our analysis is based on data from over 1,000 ICOs gathered from diverse ICO information platforms, coupled with a corpus of 910,478 tweets associated with these ICOs. We extend our investigation to include other social media platforms such as BitcoinTalk, Telegram, Facebook, and Medium. Our analysis revealed that valuable insights regarding the success of ICOs can be derived by examining text sentiment and investigating metadata across these diverse social media channels. Keywords—token sales, web scraping, sentiment analysis, social media, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) I. INTRODUCTION Recently, it has become difficult to overlook the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain in the wave of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) [1]. Marwala and Xing [1] argues that the joint force of these two technologies could determine the depth and breadth of the 4IR. Blockchain technology enables new ways of organizing economic activities, reduces costs and time associated with intermediaries, and strengthens the trust in an ecosystem of actors [2]. Lately, people are becoming accustomed with the idea of digital money in the form of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, where transactions are recorded on a secure, distributed ledger (blockchain). Along this comes a new concept: the blockchain-based token. A token is a digital representation of some shared value. A considerable number of startups have employed blockchain for fundraising, known as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Ideally, technology startups generate and sell tokens via blockchain in exchange for well established cryptocurrencies, mostly bitcoin and Ethereum. This token sale, as known as ICO, entails a limited period of online sale of a predefined number of tokens to the public. The token generation event is generally a one-time event at the beginning of a project’s lifetime. The creation and sale of tokens occur either on an existing blockchain, such as Ethereum, which is most common for ICOs, or on a new blockchain specifically created for a given ICO. The ICO was initiated in 2013, and since then, its volume has increased rapidly. By 2017, its funds had reached $3.5 B surpassing traditional crowdfundings. This can be primarily attributed to the success of five prominent ICOs; Filecoin $257 M, Tezos $232 M, EOS $185 M, Paragon $183 M and Bancor $153 M [3]. These figures highlight the significant interest from both ventures and investors in participating in such projects. Nevertheless, the level of success achieved by ICOs varies significantly across various projects. While certain ICOs manage to attract hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, many others struggle to raise any fund. Moreover, ICOs represent a risky method of investing and raising funds due to the lack of regulations, which increases the chances of scams [3]. According to research conducted by Statis Group, an ICO advisory firm, approximately 11% of investments made in ICOs were victimized by fraudulent projects “scams” [4]. Hence, it is pertinent to explore the fundamental factors that contribute to the success of ICOs. In this study, we are monitoring the social media sentiment of ICOs from the time an ICO is launched all the way to the day it closes. The success of an Initial Public Offerings (IPO) or ICO is typically assessed after the fundraising period has concluded. However, by sensing the community engagement, and opinion in the different social media platforms during the fundraising, the ICO initiators may take several actions to improve participation and attract more interest in their project to avoid a potential failure. This can involve, intensifying their marketing efforts to raise awareness about their ICO through targeted advertising campaigns, social media promotions, and Manuscript received June 21, 2024; revised July 10, 2024; accepted August 13, 2024; published January 9, 2025. Journal of Advances in Information Technology, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2025 12 doi: 10.12720/jait.16.1.12-20