February 19 will mark the launch of the ICO for Hamster Marketplace, the first decentralized retail platform offering gadgets and niche electronics. The project was created to directly connect small manufacturers of exclusive electronics with their target audience and to solve the central problems of retail: excess middlemen, high markups, and limited choices.

The dominance of major networks has led to a dissonance in online retail. The lion’s share of the market is currently concentrated in the hands of the giant retailers, who offer buyers a limited array of products. Individual manufacturers have no chance of breaking out onto the major sales platforms: it’s hard for them to compete with large suppliers and look-alike cheap products, and buyers are, in effect, deprived of choices.

Hamster Marketplace will help all talented manufacturers show off their products to an audience of a million strong that can appropriately value their inventions. Buyers will be able to find goods not available on other platforms and buy them at the manufacturers’ price. The retail platform will be managed by the vendors themselves, which will significantly decrease costs. What we will have here is a new open market free of middlemen and low-quality copycats.

“Many promising and ambitious electronics projects get stuck on the same step, the one that requires scaling business and production,” says CEO Denis Bulavin. “In a way, the developers find themselves “between Kickstarter and Amazon”: they can conduct a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign, distribute the first batch, and still not find a permanent path to their buyers. Hamster Marketplace gives each manufacturer the opportunity to present their products to a target audience of a million. Benefits go to both the manufacturer and the buyer, who now owns a unique and useful item.”

The tech presented on the platform can be purchased for fiat currency, cryptocurrency, and HMT tokens. The project tokens offer several advantages: they provide a discount when purchasing, make it possible to sell without incurring the platform commission, give access to additional features, and much more. In addition, the number of HMT tokens is limited, which will maintain their value. The project team has also addressed the possibility that early token buyers or bounty hunters could sell them off in massive numbers on the exchange and thereby send the value off a cliff. Tokens distributed to the founders and team members will be frozen for up to 9 months. And for those who participate in the bounty program, an alternative bonus payout method has been devised: instead of tokens they can receive fiat currency (at an exchange rate of 1 HMT = $2).

The project is being developed by a professional team with a lot of experience in retail, IT, finance, and marketing. Experts with experience at top positions with Amazon and eBay are involved in the project. The Hamster Marketplace founder is entrepreneur Denis Bulavin, an electronics manufacturer and founder of a company that builds tablets and robots.

The token sale will last until March 19. In all, 10 million tokens, created under the Ethereum ERC20 standard, will be issued in this issuance. The project will distribute tokens as follows: 70% of the tokens are reserved for the crowdsale, 27.5% are reserved for rewarding the team, founders, advisors, and early buyers, and 2.5% will go to the bounty program. Coins not sold during the token sale will be destroyed after the ICO concludes, and no additional issuance is planned. The limited, constantly shrinking number of coins in circulation is one of the factors maintaining liquidity in HMT tokens.

The price of one token is $2. Coins can be bought during the ICO or on the secondary market after the token sale ends. Tokens may be purchased with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and several other common cryptocurrencies: BitcoinCash, EthereumClassic, Litecoin, Ripple, Dash, Monero, Emercoin, Waves, and many others. The minimum purchase is just $10. Investors who have undergone verification will also be able to send and receive tokens with their hmstr.io and Ethereum wallets. The funds raised will be put toward launching and developing the Hamster Marketplace platform, as well as gathering a large community of vendors and buyers.

To read the White Paper, view the project roadmap, or buy tokens, you can visit the Hamster Marketplace website.