Gini Index based Initial Coin Offering Mechanism

Abstract: As a fundraising method, Initial Coin Offering (ICO) has raised billions of dollars for thousands of startups in the past two years. Existing ICO mechanisms place more emphasis on the short-term benefits of maximal fundraising while ignoring the problem of unbalanced token allocation, which negatively impacts subsequent fundraising and has bad effects on introducing new investors and resources. We propose a new ICO mechanism which uses the concept of Gini index for the very first time as a mechanism design constraint to control allocation inequality. Our mechanism maintains an elegant and straightforward structure. It allows the agents to modify their bids as a price discovery process, while limiting the bids of whales. We analyze the agents' equilibrium behaviors under our mechanism. Under natural technical assumptions, we show that most agents have simple dominant strategies and the equilibrium revenue approaches the optimal revenue asymptotically in the number of agents. We verify our mechanism using real ICO dataset we collected, and confirm that our mechanism performs well in terms of both allocation fairness and revenue.