Initial Exchange Offering (IEO)

The objective of ICOs and IEOs are essentially the same, which is to offer tokens to a large group of investors. An IEO is basically an ICO except that it is launched and managed by an existing exchange instead of the organization that created the token. The exchange holds and sells the token on behalf of the project team. This small change has significant effects on the entire process.

Many of the top exchanges who are hosting IEOs have different requirements that involve holding or using their own platform tokens in order to participate in the IEO. By creating this condition, exchanges create demand for their internal tokens, which increases its value.

The exchanges benefit in that they receive new interest from those people who want to invest in the IEO, but were not already on their platform. Essentially, both the exchange platform and the IEO project are promoting each other in a way that wouldn't have happened during a normal ICO.