The rise of new business models has seen the development of new products and services that seem to be gaining traction in the crypto community.

From IEOs to fully integrated exchanges, there’s a great deal of new services popping up. Today, I aim to cover the three main services that seem to be gaining the most traction and the ones I expect to continue rising in popularity in the future. I will also give examples of real-life cryptocurrency projects that have implemented these new services: IEOs, integrated exchanges, and DEXs (decentralised exchanges).

IEOs

An initial exchange offering (IEO) allows companies to sell tokens to investors to raise capital. This makes them similar to initial coin offerings (ICOs), but there are a few key differences. It is a new approach to crypto-banking that is catching the attention of ICO investors around the world.

IEOs can provide many benefits compared to ICOs. They offer greater security for users, improved transparency, and a fairer system that can benefit newcomers.

Two recent examples of IEOs include Ampleforth and Elrond, which sold out of tokens within minutes of going live. This highlights the popularity IEOs currently have within the space. Exchanges such as Binance and OKEx have developed their own IEO launchpad services to assist companies thinking about running IEOs to gain capital.

At the time of writing, Binance Coin (BNB) is one of the top-performing coins of 2019 due to its increased utility as the go-to token to access hot IEOs on Binance.

Integrated exchanges

Buying and selling cryptocurrency is the most attractive service to any crypto-user. That’s because the more ways we have to exchange assets, the more potential profits we’re likely to gain.

Obviously, as exchanges evolve, they also need to increase their offerings, adding more and better services in such a way that users do not even need to leave the exchange as most services are offered within.

Besides traditional exchanges like Binance or Bittrex, two new examples of integrated exchanges include COSS and BQT.

COSS allows users to earn passive income from its COS token (from trading fees) and collects fees from other cryptocurrencies and coverts them into COS for holders. It also offers IEOs and interesting features such as learning tools and social add-ons.

BQT is a social-focused exchange and provides a secure, interactive, and flexible social trading environment and user-friendly interface for its community to manage various types of transactions using a variety of different crypto-assets.

In addition, the BQT team believes the market now demands for the ability to hedge crypto assets for a short period of time to acquire other crypto holdings. While it is difficult to implement margin and options trading in a true P2P environment, the BQT team has developed an innovative and powerful tool to allow traders to generate short-term hedge trades.

The aim of BQT is to build a community of crypto traders while at the same time helping the community and benefiting from the community through the BQT university.

DEXs

Although there is no strict framework for the development or deployment of DEXs, they are commonly open source, peer-to-peer applications that allow users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies in exchange for national currencies and other cryptos.

In other words, a DEX is more than just a non-custodial exchange, as the development is done in an open and decentralised way – people choose to participate and there is no legal owner of the company.

One such example is Bisq. Bisq is unlike any other exchange as it is fully decentralised and censorship-resistant thanks to the use of alternative protection mechanisms. These include security deposits to incentivise following the trade protocol and a decentralised arbitration system to help resolve disputes.

The exchange is not described as a company but an open source project with the goal to fill a gap in the current cryptocurrency ecosystem. It does this by providing an exchange platform that follows the same principles as Bitcoin itself.