There does seem to be something fishy going on IMHO. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe there is nothing sinister at work, but certainly something is amiss amongst all the hype. My fear is that it will cost those who wish to cash in on a get rich quick scheme who are too trustworthy without giving a good critical look at the situation.
First off, the whole point of the Bitcoin revolution was for decentralized NON-intermediated exchange. Offering a new altcoin in an ICO - as if it were a stock offering for a new company is misleading and dubious. An IPO of stock occurs after the company has existed for a while with private investment before they seek to go public. They usually go public to raise capital in order to grow the company. So is XPY an ICO for XPY or is it a way for Gaw to raise capital? Who is to say they don't control (directly or indirectly) or influence 51%+ of mining capacity? Of course they make claims but there is no way to really know it's all anonymous.
Second, the set aside reserve fund for marketing and adoption by merchants is simply an advertising budget. They can advertise and market all they want, but the fact is Bitcoin has free advertising every day. Bitcoin is the Goliath and while XPY may be the David in terms of technical stats and features, it will need more than a slingshot to get it accepted by merchants and consumers alike.
Third, the fiat reserve fund is all smoke and mirrors. This implies that to the extent they still have a dollar reserve in that account they can artificially prop up the market price as XPY/BTC and XPY/USD or EUR trading comes online. This makes Gaw the de facto "Central Bank" of XPY controlling the 'price of money' (can be interpreted here as the interest rate due to the Proof-of-Stake return feature). Proof-of-work miners who can transact in BTC already have no reason not to simply mine for XPY and trade them for BTC online to effectively earn more BTC via XPY than mining for BTC directly. This is artifice and will collapse once that fiat reserve ultimately runs dry. They can also control the price of XPY to some extent by throttling the difficulty adjustments and have it deviate from the protocol. One way to encourage mining would be to artificially hold the difficulty low even while more and more hashpower is pointed at mining XPY. The problem is what if all these newly mined coins are subsequently traded for BTC? That will drive down the price in the market (denominated in BTC).
Finally, there is technological risk. Sure with today's ASICs this model is profitable, but remember that innovation in hardware in this space is moving incredibly fast. The price of hashing power has plummeted in the past year and will continue to plummet as more competition (especially from Chinese start ups etc) get going. And what about the competition that will likely be induced by the perceived profitability of the Gaw XPY ICO? There are no barriers to entry for another established firm or well-funded start up to copy and improve upon this model.
Look, I do NOT believe this is an outright scam. I do believe it smells fishy in its motives to profit Gaw and not necessarily its 'shareholders' (aka miners/hashlet owners). Is it also a slap in the face to the entire Bitcoin credo of non-intermediated exchange?
(And then there is this:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=857670.6860)