I bought in as soon as the ICO opened because I liked the idea of a decentralized marketplace but I do have some questions.

Is the IOC tradable for a currency? i.e I could spend .1 BTC to buy 1 IOC if that was the agreed upon rate?

The plan is that the IOC will be 1:1 across blockchains, but then wouldn't that mean that the underlying blockchain would implicitly make the IOC redundant. What I mean by this is if someone buys an IOC with BTC, as given in the example above, then switched that Bitcoin IOC for an Ethereum IOC, then traded that Ethereum IOC for regular Ethereum, the transfer rate would be the same as buying Ethereum with Bitcoin right? Otherwise there would be arbitrage in the system.

So due to this, IOC's role seems to be to just provide a decentralized exchange, instead of centralized ones we have now like Poloniex. The system will make money based on the trading fees, which it will distribute in various ways including miners that have the hardware nodes.

Thus, my main question is how does the IOC coin itself appreciate in value if it's fixed at that 1:1 rate. To me, it seems that any profit could only arise from arbitrage or just paying less fees to switch cryptocurrencies.

I'm still new to this (been less than 3 months) so please correct me if I'm wrong somewhere in my reasoning and if not, then how IOC the coin itself will appreciate in value.