Hi, 
To be able to initiate the IEO (Initial Exchange offering) Steemhunt needed to check all legal matters, as the HQ is located legally in South Korea.
Let's dive into some facts and background.
https://github.com/Steemhunt/web
Steemhunt is a service created and run by a company named BourbonShake Inc., officially registered in Seoul, Korea. Due to the fact that the South Korean government has still banned ICO's in Korea, it is legally not possible to start an ICO as a Korean company. Steemhunt has been very keen on making the right steps to carefully grow the service with the community. The preparation of their token offering has been done the same way. The first step was to increase the holders of HUNT tokens, but not for speculators or dumpers but for real users. Steemhunt started an innovative approach and decided to airdrop 50% of the initial tokens mainly to users and contributors to the project. This had two effects.
The airdrop was designed (and pivoted also) in different ways to engage the user base.
After creating value for HUNT tokens the next step was funding the project to step up to the next pillar. As ICO's were not an option if Steemhunt was keeping the company in Korea the team looked into different kind of options.
IEO relies on running the necessary token funding process via exchange so that the project can save much time and resources dealing with the sales contract, KYC, and heavy marketing.
Source: @steemhunt
The biggest advantage of Steemhunt is, that they are running on a small and agile team. Co-running their project with the community and using HUNT tokens as an accelerator to reward contributors has been a core strategy to keep the project as effective and development concentrated as possible. But on the other hand, as funding is a matter of a lot of preparation and can be very time consuming, an actual full ICO would have been very difficult to run, so an IEO where most of the funding activities are outsourced to the exchange is actually a great strategy to go with.
@tabrisAs one of the co-founders, Sebastian is overseeing the development of
@project7The other important pillar from
@steemhunt would not be there where it is today if it was not for the founders. But it would also not exists if Steemhunt had not a passionate community. Members have taking over important roles and following the path from all over the world. They have been asked for feedback and this kind of communication had been melted into the code and established the typical Steemhunt community. One of the biggest assets and strength Steemhunt has is and will be also in the future this international community power.
There are in total three rounds planned on three different exchanges. After the last IEO on 29th of March, the HUNT token is going to be listed on DAYBIT exchange. Depending on the trading volume more exchanges are planned. The exact exchanges are not yet announced as the contracts are not yet fully signed, but it looks like that we will get that information in a few days.
We will have to look into the actual calculation for HUNT tokens and see how the IEO price compares to that.
@coingecko is 0.332USD and SBD is 0.95USD
This would mean that the current market price for a HUNT token is around 0.031 USD but the offered IEO is at 0.02USD, which is a gain of about 50%. If you are able to activate your special offer for Steemians (10%) your profit would be even bigger.
Steemhunt has prepared a special 10% Bonus for Steemians. To be able to participate in this event you will have to hurry up, as it is only going to be active until 27th of Feb (KST). Please follow the instruction here and commit your participation in the following document.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdng5R5OlvuySH0GDcPkp0LUfYtz-csTjGgnlgPE9Dc60gu5A/viewform?usp=sf_link
It is important to see how this IEO is going to show a new way of funding for Steem and SMT based projects. Not launching funding with a Whitepaper, but starting the product, growing the community and pivoting the product from an MVP to a stable stage and after that starting to think about funding means that you need to have a very long breath to keep your project alive until momentum. I wish the best for this IEO and also sure that we will have other successful SMT projects following this path.
