I've happened to be following this project for awhile. One of my favourite dark horses, frankly: poor at communications, better than average at actual business. I've spotted a few misconceptions that arised in this thread, hope I could clarify the things a bit
If you go to Bounties section, you will see a lot of bounties that give more than $1M free tokens. So i think its normal for marketing canpaign that always cost much on plan. But you 1st need to check this ICO is legal or not. Even real project or scam project that also can give much money for marketing campaign, so be carefull.
That's true, but most of these project are at the idea stage, and it's far from evident that those tokens will have any value (quite unikely for most of the cases, to be honest.) In contrast, you can use opengift tokens even today to buy services on their platform.
They may really be offering that much tokens for the people eligible. What you have to ask yourself though, is who determines the value of those tokens? If OpenGift alone set selling its price, and it cannot be sold anywhere and OpenGift wouldn't buy it back, how exactly do you determine its actual monetary worth? The answer is you don't.
I wish the project be a bit more articulative on this, but as far as I inderstood $0,2 ($1M/5M tokens = $0,2 per token) IS a price they are buying (or going to buy) back the tokens. Now when you purchase smth with BTC on the platform the price gets denominated in USD, while developers receive the native tokens. The WP says that developers will be able to sell back the tokens with zero spread, and that means they could set any price in this system (obviousely, it will have a limited liquidity). They simple set price in tokens for which they buy USD/BTC/etc., then they are buying tokens for the same price...
You asked the correct question by asking why they would need a blockchain in the first place. They don't.
I agree that they could probably do the similar thing without blockchain. I would argue that with blockchain they can do it much better.