Gate.io, one of the long-standing crypto exchanges, is developing its proprietary public blockchain called Gatechain and will give away 300 million Gatechain token starting April 8th, according to a blog post published on April 1.

Per the post, Gatechain positions itself as a public chain dedicated to digital assets safety and will also serve as the base for its decentralized exchange. The company said a test network launch is expected in Q3 2019 and the mainnet will be put out in Q4.

In a recent interview with 8btc, Gate.io founder Han Lin noted the Gatechain will focus on tackling two knotty problems facing trading platforms, namely, the theft of users’ digital assets and the missing of a private key.

“ Traditional solutions such as multi-signature wallets and cold storage appear to be impracticable and will not be widely adopted by ordinary users, ” said Han, who added that Gatechain will reduce the thresh-hold for digital assets storage, while safeguarding the assets without the need for storing the private key in a Swiss bank.

Even though the mainnet of Gatechain has yet to go live, the crypto exchange rushes to launch its native utility-token GT that will be used to pay the transaction gas on the mainnet, and promises to give away 300 million tokens to users, which account for 30 percent of the total supply of 1 billion tokens. The airdrop of these 300 million GT will go through four phases, starting from UTC 4:00, April 8.

If Gate.io users want to receive free tokens, they need to purchase POINTs first, a new product that is used to deduct transaction fees. 1 POINT equals 1 USDT fee. According to the blog post, in the first two phases of the GT airdrop, the initial rate is 1 POINT to 2.5 GT. GT will be listed on Gate.io for trading in the middle of April.

A Chinese crypto analyst believed that the GT price possibly remains relatively stable after being tradeable, but if Gate.io launches an initial exchange offering (IEO) platform following in the footsteps of Binance, Huobi and OKEx, GT that is expected to be accepted for participating in IEOs will surge in the short-term.

Gate.io announces the big thing at a time when IEO is gaining popularity in the crypto sector, which helps drive up the price of many exchange tokens such as Binance’s BNB and Huobi’s HT and pump up exchanges’trading volumes. The new initiatives Gate.io unveiled on Monday actually lays the groundwork for the launch of its IEO platform and is expected to lure more traders.