Recently, I've seen a lot of positive press regarding IEOs. After all, Binance is already successfully running them, giving ICO projects a chance to shine and many other exchanges are following suit.
My personal opinion is that IEOs should be discouraged. Firstly, it gives more and more power to these centralised exchanges, who are able to charge higher, more ridiculous listing fees for coins as well as extremely large payments to hold IEOs. Their vested interests in this way mean they are less likely to care about vetting projects that may be untrustworthy, leading to even more irresponsible behaviour.
Exchanges are already making far too much from listing fees, so IEOs on top are completely unnecessary. While they are good promotion for coins, such practices cannot be good in the long-term.
Instead, the focus should be easy-to-use decentralised exchanges which don't require intrusive KYC/AML and are much less likely to be corrupt/ill-willed if some DAO-like structure is in place. While blockchain technology has made the storage of data much safer, what is the point if thousands of crypto exchanges hold endless amounts of data on the customers in the same way banks do? The only thing changing is who owns the data, so privacy has not improved. And as crypto adoption increases, so will regulation of exchanges.
We don't want to end up in a situation where to trade any meaningful amount of crypto you have to send your name, address, ID, and bank account details to some exchange which can do whatever it likes with your data.
Your thoughts?