Entrepreneurial Investment Decisions in Blockchain Startups: Structured Criteria and the Provisional Moderating Role of Investor Personality

This study investigates the determinants of investors’ perceived decision-process quality, addressing a critical gap in the entrepreneurial finance literature, where blockchain ventures have been examined predominantly through speculative asset lenses rather than as entrepreneurial firms. Drawing on a sample of 51 blockchain investors, we employ partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test a model integrating investment criteria, investor personality traits, and demographic characteristics as predictors of the Successful Investor Profile—a perceptual construct measuring perceived decision-process quality rather than realized investment success. We collected data through a structured online survey administered via Typeform. The aim of this study is to identify the determinants of the Successful Investor Profile in early-stage blockchain startups and to clarify the role of personality traits in this process. The findings show that structured investment criteria exert the dominant influence (β = 0.509, f2 = 0.649, R2 = 0.919), while personality traits show evidence of moderating rather than directly predicting outcomes, although this moderation is specification-dependent (see below). A significant interaction is observed at the position of emotional stability (β = 0.870, p = 0.002), but emotional stability is not empirically separable from conscientiousness at this sample size, so the finding is reported as dispositional conditioning of the criteria–profile relationship rather than as the effect of a named trait. This conditioning is provisional: it is not observed when the five traits are combined into a single composite personality score (interaction β = 0.018, not significant), which instead shows a significant direct effect (β = 0.312, p = 0.007) on the Successful Investor Profile, so the result should be read as specification-dependent rather than established, whereas demographic characteristics, except for investment experience duration (β = 0.275, p = 0.008), show no significant effects. We contribute to entrepreneurship theory by specifying boundary conditions for rational choice and identity economics in the blockchain context, and to practice by proposing a transparent, criterion-referenced evaluation framework for entrepreneurial venture assessment.