Bitfinex Announces Tokinex, An IEO Platform With One Key Distinction

The Initial Exchange Offering has galvanized the crypto markets – but until a few days ago Bitfinex, which has endured a tumultuous few weeks, was surprisingly quiet on the subject. While Binance launched Matic and Celer, Bittrex canceled RAID, and exchanges across the globe hopped on a rapidly-accelerating bandwagon, innovation specialist iFinex was uncharacteristically silent.

That all changed with the announcement that Bitfinex itself raised a quick billion dollars in a 10-day private sale, before releasing their pidgin Latin Unus Sed Leo tokens to a mildly-bewildered mass audience.

But since Bitfinex appears to thrive on pressure (and that-whole-Tether-thing apparently isn’t enough) the crypto exchange is creating an entire IEO platform to launch other projects.

Tokinex is the new initiative, and in many ways it follows a formula that is becoming familiar throughout the crypto space. The exchange will offer projects that meet certain vetting criteria to customers who successfully pass KYC (in this case, via the Blockpass mobile app) and those customers can then purchase tokens ready for “frictionless trading on the secondary market”.

If you saw it before, you’ll love it when you see it again… but the déjà vu isn’t yet complete.

Like competitors including Binance Launchpad, Huobi Prime, and KuCoin Spotlight, Bitfinex is committed to providing virtually instant liquidity within a massive pool – and for contributors, that means no long wait for the wheel to spin. If the project is a hit, they’ll know almost instantly. They can fund their successful application for tokens directly from their own BTC wallets.

Never one to mince words, Bitfinex CEO Jean Louis van der Velde explained that “Tokinex brings the opportunity for anyone to participate in quality token sales in a fair environment, and for tokens to gain exposure to Bitfinex and Ethfinex users with no upfront cost.”

Aha!

There it is. Nestled away at the end of that sentence is – finally – a significant differentiator, and it is important.

While *some* exchanges have been charging for access to their IEO platforms, the iFinex family doesn’t plan to do so. And that may mean that the projects listed on Bitfinex / Ethfinex have a more democratic selection process, possibly depending less on the cash reserves of the business and more on its value to potential customers.

It may mean that. We hope it means that.

Will Harborne, Founder of Ethfinex, was a little more forthcoming, and told Crypto Briefing that “One of the founding tenants of Tokinex is to be the trusted home of token sales, and therefore it is key to empower participants with unbiased and credible information about each token. One of the ways in which we’ve done this is by providing access to comprehensive and entirely independent, third party research reports, the first of which is by respected industry experts, Smith and Crown.”

The true nature of Tokinex will be revealed later this week, when its first IEO project is announced on May 23rd for a June sale.

That should help to clear up whether Tokinex intends to be the Simba of IEO platforms – or the Scar.

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