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Abstract
The meteoric ascent of the cryptocurrency market in the last two years has drawn a large number of both investors and bystanders (NDTV Business Desk, 2022). Nakamoto (2008, p.4) defines cryptocurrency as "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash [that] would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." Bitcoin's public introduction in 2009 marked the beginning of the cryptocurrency economy. Bitcoin, a distributed digital cryptocurrency, is widely regarded as the first open and decentralized currency (Cousins et al., 2019). In just over a decade, the cryptocurrency market has grown to over 1.8T dollars (CoinMarketCap, 2022), which when compared to the gold market of 12.5T dollars, is quite significant. Many people mistakenly assume that crypto coins and tokens are the same things, but they are not. While at a basic level all cryptocurrencies are tokens, not all tokens are crypto coins. Coins are' tokens' that reside on and use their own blockchain to trade currency and store value. The most famous examples of coins are Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), which were created on their own developed blockchain systems. In contrast, tokens are applications that trade on pre-existing blockchain systems (Momtaz, 2019). For example, Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a crypto token that relies on the ETH blockchain (CoinMarketCap, 2022). Tokens, by their very nature, pose a much greater risk for the investor than do coins. The reason for this is that developers could create and launch a token on a pre-existing blockchain with the intention to scam investors. An example of this was a crypto token based on the famous South Korean Netflix series, Squid Game, that was successfully launched, gained investors, collapsed, and was later proven to be a scam (BBC News, 2021). From a socio-technical and multidisciplinary standpoint, an IS research framework is needed to better understand the cryptocurrency ecosystem and the challenges facing stakeholders (Sas & Khairuddin, 2017). In this study, we want to answer the research question, what are the differences between individual investors' intention to invest between crypto coins and crypto tokens? We will explore factors motivating investors such as the risk of investing, trust in coins and tokens, and profit expectancy in order to better understand the different attitudes and motivations for investors when choosing coins and/or tokens.
Recommended Citation
Mohit, Hossein and Johnson, Vess L., "Coin or Token: Different Motivations for Investing in Cryptocurrency" (2022). AMCIS 2022 TREOs. 33.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/treos_amcis2022/33