I will start with the first item:

The continuous active development and growing higher quality products on the market

As EXMO co-founder Ivan Petukhovsky predicted at the end of 2018 the quality of crypto-market is now increasing.

“During the last years, the market was overflowing with “garbage” crypto-assets and fake projects, because of the hype around ICO throughout 2017–2018. In 2018, the market cleansing phase has already begun and passed actively. We believe that in 2019 this trend will not just continue, but the market will recover for raising capital through the issuance of digital assets. The quality of the market will increase.”

Details in a “Five main trends that will shape The Crypto World in 2019” article:

The first quarter of 2019 is over. We still have an active hype around Initial Exchange Offering(IEO)

IEO is an alternative and less risky version of ICO, which we have already discussed earlier.

Maria Stankevich has outlined the key differences between IEO and ICO and explained the position of the exchange on the EXMO example.

“An Initial Exchange Offering is a token sale held on an exchange. The key difference between an IEO and a traditional ICO or private sale is the use of exchange as an intermediary. The exchange team conducts a preliminary audit and technical verification of the project and its tokens assess the project’s investment attractiveness and potential, after which it announces the start of the token sale on the exchange. Investors wishing to purchase tokens do not need to send funds via a smart contract (as in the case of an ICO), register on the exchange and buy coins immediately from their personal account.”

Details in an “Initial Exchange Offering: A New Alternative to ICO?” article:

The key benefits and difficulties of IEO:

Crowdsales are being launched by the exchanges, they select promising teams and projects with further promotion of their coins among the users of the exchange.

The acquired coins of new projects appear in the listing on the exchange that conducts tokensale almost immediately, and investors are able to sell their assets quickly.

The new users/registrations for the exchange.

The main difficulty of participation is that on most platforms user needs to be verified or to go through KYC. An interesting fact, that from all the exchanges we had as an example, only EXMO doesn’t need any extra options except registration on the platform. Carefully study the details and conditions, since they can be individualized for each product.

Key differences between ICO and IEO