Beyond token price: a conceptual framework for comprehensive assessment of post-ICO success

Measuring the success of initial coin offerings (ICOs) in the post-ICO phase is critical for sustaining long-term growth. Conventional performance and financial metrics used in initial public offers (IPOs) are often unavailable for ICOs due to the absence of regulatory oversight. Existing literature relies on proxies such as token price, exchange listing, and initial returns, which offer insights into investor response, venture uncertainty, and financial performance. However, these metrics have limitations as they offer a limited view of long-term growth and may not reflect the project's overall success. This paper aims to address this gap by providing an overview of existing post-ICO performance metrics and cross-referencing them with literature on IPOs and other innovative funding types to identify more comprehensive ways to assess ICO success and
contribution to organisational growth. The proposed framework incorporates both conventional financial measures and non-financial measures such as project milestones, user growth, revenue diversification, strategic partnerships, community engagement, technology development, and token utilisation. This paper contributes to understanding how to measure ICO success by emphasizing the limitations of existing proxy financial measures and introducing a comprehensive framework that includes both financial and non-financial measures, offering a holistic view of the long-term growth potential of ICOs.