OKEx Announced its First Token Sale via IEO

Major cryptocurrency exchange OKEx has announced an initial exchange offering (IEO) for the BLOC token, on their newly-presented OK Jumpstart token sale platform. The sale marks the first such endeavor of the exchange, joining the likes of Binance and Bittrex in the so-called killer app club.

The token in question is BLOC, native to the Blockcloud blockchain, and the sale is set to start at AM 12:00 UTC on April 10th. “Combining the advantages of blockchain and Future Internet technology, it reconstructs the technology layers below where current blockchain networks and Internet applications operate,” explains the project’s website. In short, it is a blockchain-based TCP/IP architecture, where TCP/IP is a suite of communication protocols used to interconnect network devices on the internet.

The token sale uses a subscription + allotment approach. Users will have a timeframe of 30 minutes to subscribe, and allotment will be based on the amount of the exchange’s native OKB tokens they hold over a seven-day period. The minimum threshold for a subscription is 500 OKB tokens (USD 1,145) held for those seven consecutive days, or buying in 3,500 OKB tokens on the last day – but to have their subscription guaranteed, users need to hold at least 2,500 OKB tokens daily or buy 17,500 OKB tokens on the final day before snapshot time.

The snapshots, which will be used to prove the users’ eligibility for participation, will be taken every day at AM 10:00 UTC, starting seven days before the token sale day. Then, users get their individual allotment coefficients based on the sum of OKB holdings in the moment of those snapshots. Users will have their individual subscription amounts in OKB locked up, and receive tokens based on a formula available on the OKEx blog. This formula bases the token allotment on both how many tokens users held during this period, as well as the amount of OKB they locked in as their subscription.

This move lets OKEx join the club of exchanges offering fundraising services. The latest example was Bittrex, where the token sale of VeriBlock tokens took a mere 10 seconds, beating even Binance’s speed of 22 seconds for the Fetch.AI token. Binance’s co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao coined the term “killer app” back in February, when he said in an interview that he views exchange-based fundraising as the next killer app.