Hi @thejohalfiles - to give you some background, I work full time in the blockchain sector, specifically with ICOs.
VICE published this article a few hours ago talking about how they will be using an ERC20 token for the ICO.
I imagine that they will move to an SMT, once they are launched. ERC20 tokens often have network congestion issues, due to bloating on Ethereum's network. I would think that VICE are ready for ICO, so decided to get it started right away by using and ERC20 token, but when they want to scale they will move to SMTs, so that users can benefit from fast transactions, the reward pool, and all the other positives of SMTs. Otherwise, VICE would have to build a whole rewards pool smart contract with all of SMT's consensus mechanisms in order to reward users for watching etc., that would also interact with IPFS - I don't even know if such complexities are possible with solidity, as I don't know the language too well.
I hope this helps, I would really appreciate your feedback on my latest project!
Edit - see @sndbox's reply, VICE have forked Steemit's code.
nice
But does forking steems code mean that they will use an SMT? If they get all the benefits of the graphene architecture, why use an SMT?