The first IEO at IDCM and the second and third IEO at Probit had been very successful. Steemhunt has now a lot of new HUNT token holders also outside of the Steem economy. Now that the first listing of HUNT tokens is fixed at Daybit it is now only a few weeks and the first Steem based Dapp Token is going to be launched at an exchange. This is really exciting.
As Steemhunt is running different channels to answer questions about IEO, there was various kind of communications and questions coming from potential investors about the listing. But one of the questions that I heard from time to time was the following.
Why are you listing your token at Daybit? Why not at a big exchange?
I would like to get into the details about it.
0. Repository
https://github.com/Steemhunt/web
1. What does a listing on an exchange mean?
2017 was the year of ICO's where a lot of projects gathered money to develop their products. This means that most of the projects were gathering the money for something they were supposed to make "after" the funding. The normal process was to secure money for marketing the ICO itself. Also, a lot of money was needed to secure a bigger team to show that the project is able to finish the promised work. Additionally, a lot of the tokens or coins were spread to so-called advisors who were giving their names for tokens. In the end, each project tried to generate as much "trust" as possible.
Out of 4290 projects listed on 
The rush on projects that had the world "Blockchain" somewhere included in their name was almost crazy in 2017 and investors from young to old through and mostly sunk their money into ghost projects. And even if these projects had good intentions to develop their products, the cost of keeping an ICO and the dumping later on, after listing a coin on an exchange made the life for crypto investors in this bear time really hard.
But a listing on an exchange is still a very important part of a coin/token economy. As most of the coins/tokens were meant as utility tokens (and yes, it could be debatable to define what a utility token is, but we will not go into detail here) you will need a place where investors and users can actually buy or exchange your token. Some tokens also come based on their blockchain economy with a DEX, as EOS or Tron does. But at the end, most of the investor money is moving on centralized exchanges, which is the reason that you will need your token/coin listed on such an exchange.
2. How do you get listed on an exchange?
It depends on your project and the exchange itself, but we could define it in two ways.
a. The project is big enough that exchanges are interested
If we look into it as an example for Steem, there are from time to time different polls on exchanges to see if a certain user base would be interested in trading the cryptocurrency on their exchange. Mostly in those cases, the exchange itself is interested to bring a new cryptocurrency on board to increase the trading volume and user numbers. For a blockchain project, this would be the best way to get into additional exchanges, as the project would have a higher negotiation power than otherwise.
b. The project is approaching exchanges to be listed.
In this case, the listing comes in normal cases with a high price. Exchanges are asking for a relatively high % of tokens/coins of your project and partly also in other currencies to get your project listed. Also, another part where you need to invest in market making. So, the investing part is definitely much higher than the case a. listed above.
3. Why Daybit as first exchange listing an SMT project?
There are several strategic reasons why Daybit has been chosen as the first partner to list HUNT tokens. So let's try to see the "Pro-Contra" list to make our own picture about it.
PRO
- Daybit was willing to implement STEEM/SBD as trading pair for this project.
- Daybit can swap HUNT tokens from ERC-20 later to SMT, as they have their own wallet solution.
- Daybit will start to offer FIAT on their exchange soon.
- Daybit is offering international access (not only for Korea)
- Daybit is working very closely with Steemhunt to match the needs for an SMT based project.
- High self-marketing efforts to push Steemhunt with Daybit. (Cost)
- Sophisticated Exchange solution
- API sharing with Steemhunt to link company demands directly with Daybit transactions.
- Mother company is a long advisor and partner for Steemhunt.
- Mother company is big enough to support the efforts.
CONTRA
- Current trading volume is not big
- Own DAY currency strategy was not clear in the past.
- Name value is still low.
We can see that one of the negative points is actually really important because you will need trading volume to get your project growing and your token traded. If we would look at the current status of Daybit, it would be the wrong decision to go based on the trading volume. But the problem is, that even on bigger exchanges you will have the problem that for smaller projects the trading volume is created either with cross trading or does not exist. As Daybit announced, they are currently in the middle of realigning their strategy to get back into the top 20 of exchanges. In addition to the launch of Reviewhunt at https://steemhunt.com/, we will see an additional boost of Daybit. Steemhunt is planning to connect the Daybit API for companies, so they can buy HUNT tokens for their Reviewhunt projects easily. As Daybit is also planning to introduce FIAT(KRW) pairs, it would make it much easier for bigger companies to issue and manage the financial part of a marketing project with Reviewhunt.
4. So where is Steemhunt leading Steem?
I think this chart is showing the best effect for the Steem blockchain. We have now due to the IEO an MAU of over 400K for a Dapp based on SMT. A lot of investors also asking general questions about Steem itself and looking into details what Steem is about.
If you search now for Steemhunt in Korean at the major search engine "Naver", you will find a lot of content recently created about Steemhunt outside the Steem community and also more than 130 articles related to Steemhunt on the Korean News section.
Due to the marketing efforts from Steemhunt, the search result on Google also shows a lot of new articles about Steemhunt outside the Steem economy, which is in the end also positive for Steem and Steem holders.
5. Conclusion
We have at the moment a bear market. Launching an IEO in a bear market is not an easy decision nor an easy project to handle. I think the Steemhunt team and the community have done a great job until now and I am looking forward to the launch of Reviewhunt, the listing of HUNT tokens and the next steps this amazing community will show the world.
6. By the way.
By the way, the IEO for Daybit just starts with following details. Don't miss it!
Participate in HUNT IEO at Daybit - https://daybit.com/ieos
Daybit IEO will have two separate batches as below:
[1st batch - Day Token Only]
- Date: April 1st, 2019, at 13:00 (KST) - April 5th, 2019, at 24:00 (KST)
- Swap currency: DAY
- Price: 0.02 USD per HUNT
- Bonus rate: 20%
- Bonus lock-up period: 60 days after the HUNT is officially listed
[2nd batch - STEEM and Other Tokens]
- Date: April 8th, 2019, at 13:00 (KST) - April 12th, 2019, at 24:00 (KST)
- Swap currency: STEEM, BTC, ETH, EOS
- Price: 0.02 USD per HUNT
- Bonus rate: 14%
- Bonus lock-up period: 90 days from the HUNT is officially listed
The first batch sales are performed only with the DAY token (the exchange’s own token), and it has differentiated benefits as below:
- The bonus rate is 20% which is one of the two highest rates in our past rounds.
- The bonus lock-up period is 60 days which is shorter than other bonus lock-ups.