StartMark Joins The Security Token Alliance
Tokyo, Japan — August 8, 2019 — The Security Token Alliance, an alliance that brings together organizations advancing the security token industry, is announcing that StartMark is among the latest to partner with the Alliance.
The Security Token Alliance is founded on the belief that the present and future of digitized securities will benefit from wide participation in projects and an ecosystem for stakeholder connections. The organization was founded in May 2019 by Frederik Bussler.
StartMark is the third Security Token in history that was approved for the German market by BaFin (German Financial Regulatory Authority). With their Security Token Offering (STO) they aim to raise €50 million of capital — which will be reinvested in a broad portfolio of promising German start-up companies. Their goal is to generate a strong double-digit rate of return for all their investors. We spoke with Ralf Heine, Managing Director at StartMark, to discuss the industry and our new partnership.
Why Join the Security Token Alliance?
The Security Token Alliance was borne out of seeing the fragmentation and immaturity of a high-potential industry — Security Tokens. We established a powerful network of over 100 industry executives to combat this. Heine notes that the experiences brought about by such an international group can help their own expansion:
“I’m excited to learn from international experiences with security tokens and potentially help to drive our cause globally.”
As Security Tokens are a relatively new concept, this experience from different stakeholders may prove invaluable.
What StartMark Provides
While the Alliance contributes research and consulting support to its member organizations, StartMark brings German expertise that would prove useful for other partners in the area:
“We can bring in experience from Germany. We are one of only three companies to date who have succeeded to gain approval for our securities (prospectus) from BaFin (the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority). All previous STOs in Germany had to circumvent German authorities and make their offerings though Switzerland, Luxemburg, Estonia, Malta etc.”
Industry Trends
Heine notes an important step for StartMark is to make its security token tradeable:
“Our next challenge is to find (help create) a crypto exchange that is capable of trading security tokens. (Because we promised in our prospectus to enable daily trading in the future).”
Through the Alliance’s connections with various Security Token exchanges, we aim to support StartMark in its journey to enable daily trading.
The Future of StartMark and the Partnership
Heine notes that StartMark’s challenges and solutions to these challenges create win-win situations in the Alliance as well as broader investment communities:
“We would like to get inspiration and experiences and arguments to accelerate our challenge with crypto exchanges, and do the same to pave the way for broader knowledge and acceptance of STO within the German investment community.”
The Security Token Alliance is currently signing and on-boarding a wide cross-section of respected security token professionals and organizations with the goal of broadening participation in digital assets in order to create the best financial outcomes for humanity.
For more information or membership inquiries, contact frederik@sta.foundation.
