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A [recent post on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/a0sv9j/icos_sold_more_than_100000_eth_in_the_past_seven/) shows how many ICO's sold over 100,000 Eth in the past week and before you say "yeah well that's mainly why they raised those funs" then I want you to know that I am not arguing that. What I'm wondering is why are they selling it now? Ether is barely worth $100 down from $1400 at the top, why would they not have made the most of it earlier to fund their own project better? Since that's not something we are going to get an answer I wanna talk about the difference of investing in SMT's compared to the ERC-20 era. 

Lately I've been fascinated by @steemhunt and the great ways they've encouraged users to curate on their platform for token distribution. A few ways you can earn hunt tokens are by posting, moderating, sharing, curating, commentating and delegating. The important aspect here though is that at no point are they asking you to invest Steem as in giving them your Steem in bulks. Why is this important? Well you see the majority of the ICO's in 2017 and 2018 have already failed, that's a lot of ether that the investors are never going to see again unless they buy back in. After you've been convinced from their ICO pitch and you make an investment, all you can do from there is hope that everything will go according to plan - often it does not and it leaves you helpless. "Well those investors have already gained a lot from the rise in Ethereum price - it's their own fault they were greedy trying to make more from new ICO's", here's the thing though, it doesn't have to be that way. Sure some investors may have gotten burned and its their own fault, sure some of them should've been happy with the profits they'd already made from ETH and should've just traded that back and forth instead - but there are smarter ways to invest and one of them will be through Steem. 

On Steem you will be able to invest in projects directly with Steem Power delegation, RC delegation (probably sometime soon) and your activity directly. Not only that but you will be able to follow all of these projects on your favorite front-ends directly. Many of the already existing future SMT's are doing reports on a weekly basis and with everything being in one place it makes the whole procedure a lot more smooth. You will be able to choose your delegation investment by exact amounts depending on which one you think will do best and you will be able to change that ratio whenever you like. I know a lot of us here are already aware of this but imagine what outsiders who have had to invest their ETH directly and take a huge risk will think of being able to invest through the reward pool alone. It removes a huge risk on their side because if things don't run according to their expectations, they can just undelegate and power down if they want out and still have the tokens they've generated bound to their username to maybe find a nice surprise later in the future if they notice they made the wrong judgement of an SMT. 

I'm not sure what you guys think, but although these prices are reflecting the same way around the whole ecosystem right now I am sure that they are reflecting poorly on Steem and its future potential. A huge reason for this is because traders got in, bought most coins in the top 100-500 and just left them sitting there on exchanges and when they see the price drop all over the board they may decide to either get out at a huge loss or go back into Bitcoin or Eth waiting for the next uptrend. I personally don't think many Steemians in their right mind are selling Steem at these prices cause they do not believe in its future potential. I'm going to try and make the most out of it at these times to collect more Steem, it's not the first time that traders are losing out because they were just holding coins on exchanges - steem power inflation through curation rewards or now through delegating to bid bots has given holders a giant advantage to those traders. I'm hoping that coming next bull market new investors will take more time to read into what they are buying and how they can make the most out of holding it - this is not just related to Steem as there are plenty of other proof of stake coins or those with masternodes out there costing holders on exchanges a lot of value. 

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