Big News in the Crypto World: The First STO in History Closes for $18 Million!
San Francisco Blockchain Week 2018 — Standing on the main stage alongside Indiegogo founder Slava Rubin, President of asset management company Elevated Returns, Stephane De Baets made a stunning announcement in front of a conference hall packed full of blockchain and cryptocurrency insiders:
“Today we just heard great news. We actually closed a security token offering. If you look at the name, Elevated Returns, and ‘Aspen Coin’, we actually closed $18,000,000 in capital to purchase a fragmented equity stake in the St. Regis Aspen Resort.”
The financial world has been waiting for this news since early August, when the plan was first reported by Crowdfund Insider that Templum Markets would be working with Aspen Digital to tokenize common stock shares of the St. Regis Aspen Resort in Aspen, Colorado. The tokenized shares called ‘Aspen Coins’ were listed on crowdfunding site Indiegogo, which allowed accredited investors to purchase the coins under the SEC’s Regulation D, 506(c) exemption. Each Aspen Coin had a listed token price of $1.00 with a minimum investment of $10,000.
Real estate is perfect for tokenization because of its security and stability but also for its almost comical inefficient and illiquid nature. Blockchain technology utilizes the upside of real estate investing (security and stability) and eliminates the inefficiencies. “You’re actually talking about a real asset that people are paying hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars every night to stay in, and this already makes tons of revenue. It (real estate tokenization) fragments the asset. If you wanted to buy the St. Regis Aspen before fragmentation, you would have had to write a check for $250 to $300 Million. That limits the number of people that can actually have exposure to the asset.”- Slava
“That’s right. It’s real. First of all, you can touch it. You can stay in the hotel. It has an income stream as well, so it’s income generating. Like you say Slava, you have a downside protection because there’s always the asset.”- De Baets.
The announcement of the successful campaign has been a long time coming and marks the first ever completed security token offering in history; giving the world a small glimpse into the massive disruption about to take place in the real estate and financial world.
“This transaction perfectly showcases the RealtyReturns model (tokenized real estate) and this first completed transaction just proves that our model works. The size of the investment is especially exciting for us because it shows that the market is there for us. It shows that there is a large demand from accredited investors for these types of real estate investments using crowdfunding and cryptocurrency.” said Manny Fernandez, Co-Founder and CEO RealtyReturns.
RealtyReturns is a tokenized real estate marketplace that uses blockchain technology to offer fractional ownership investment opportunities in income generating real estate properties. Their security token, the “Returns Token” is an ERC-20 security token which is backed by physical real estate and has the ability to be traded on any number of growing security token exchanges. RealtyReturns recently announced their upcoming ICO launching on the 23rd of this month with their first planned real estate transaction coming shortly thereafter.
“Asset backed coins (tokens) like the Aspen Coin not only offer a transformative way to invest in real estate, but also establish a new way to store wealth by utilizing collateralized and income generating digital assets. We believe that the real estate tokenization model has tremendous potential in that it brings liquidity and disinter-mediation to the world’s largest asset class.”, said De Baets.
Security token offerings give investors the access and the ability to invest in asset classes that previously would have been unavailable to them due to financial limitations, simple lack of access or cross-border investing restrictions. One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that security tokens, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology are the future, and the future has just begun.
- Rexford R. Hibbs, Co-Founder / COO — RealtyReturns.io
Rexford is a serial entrepreneur, real estate investor and public speaker. Rexford previously co-founded DreamFunded with, San Francisco’s first registered equity crowdfunding platform; helping raise money for promising startups. His latest venture, security token real estate marketplace RealtyReturns is preparing for its’ upcoming ICO on October 23rd. He is an experienced real estate investor and developer; working alongside his father Robert E. Hibbs to manage the Hibbs Family Office.
