Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs)

IEOs, popularized around 2019 on platforms like Binance Launchpad, shifted token sales onto exchanges.

The exchange acts as intermediary: vetting the project, hosting the sale, and often immediately listing the token.

This added trust and convenience – investors felt more secure knowing an exchange did due diligence, and token liquidity was available right away.

Indeed, IEOs saw rapid successes: for example, Binance’s BitTorrent sale raised 7.2 million in 15 minutes, and Fetch.AI raised 6 million in just 6 seconds.

In total, IEO projects collectively raised an estimated $1.67 billion (with 84% of that in 2019 alone).

This frenzy underscored both the demand for new tokens and the efficiency of exchange-operated launches.

While IEOs improved on some ICO issues (reducing scams via vetting, simplifying the user experience), they introduced new centralization.

The exchange became the gatekeeper – deciding which projects to list and who could participate (often requiring KYC and holding the exchange’s own token for eligibility), and sometimes imposing per-user purchase caps.

Essentially, participants had to trust the exchange’s selection and abide by its rules.

PoG removes the exchange layer entirely, returning to a fully on-chain process.

This means anyone with a wallet can participate;

there’s no account signup or regional restriction beyond access to the blockchain.

It embodies the decentralized ethos to an even greater degree than IEOs – no single platform controls the launch.

Of course, the trade-off is the lack of built-in compliance or investor protection;

PoG is a “buyer beware” environment like ICOs were, with code enforcing rules instead of an exchange.

However, from a distribution standpoint, PoG ensures a level of credible neutrality even an exchange cannot guarantee – gas doesn’t care about marketing or insider connections, only willingness to pay.

Another difference is in liquidity timing. IEOs typically list tokens immediately on the hosting exchange, so trading and price discovery begin right away (often yielding an initial price pop for those who got in).

In PoG, since distribution is on-chain, liquidity provision (e.g. creating a Uniswap pool) might be left to the project or the community after the event.

Projects could coordinate a simultaneous decentralized exchange listing to provide a trading venue as PoG tokens are claimed.

It’s worth noting that participants in PoG have effectively paid in gas for their tokens, so their cost basis is the gas spent (which is sunk cost).

This might reduce immediate sell pressure compared to an ICO/IEO buyer who paid in ETH;

in PoG, one cannot recoup gas costs except through the token’s value appreciation, which aligns participants with the project’s long-term success.

In theory, this could create a more committed initial community, as those who expended resources to get the tokens have a strong incentive to see the project succeed.