
The Security Token Ecosystem Study Summarized #4
Our daily series to summarize our comprehensive Digital Securities Study enters day 4. Together we will take a look at secondary markets — the missing key-part of the ecosystem as our research showed.
Operability
Our research showed that out of the companies we identified only a few are currently able to provide an operational secondary market. But this issue doesn’t necessarily derive from the companies inability to finish their product.

More often regulatory issues are the problem companies face when they want to open up a marketplace that supports public trading ofdigital securities. While issuance regulations are roughly decided upon, secondary trading still has to go a long way to reach the same state.
Target groups
So far the most comparable type of secondary markets — crypto exchanges— majorly target retail investors and with the digital securities exchanges it will be no different. 89% of the infrastructure will be available for retail investors and only 11% are supposed to be institutional-exclusive.

Geographical distribution
The USA lead this category as well with 12 companies, even though their legal framework isn’t as advanced. Generally a favourable legal framework attracts many companies as seen on the 2nd to 4th place: Malta, Singapore and Switzerland with a combined 16 companies all meet this qualification.
Nevertheless, secondary markets are spread out all over the world with a total of 21 different countries active in this category.
Conclusion
As we stated in this article and in our study already: Secondary markets are just in the beginning of their existence and have a long way ahead of them, with the goal to complete the ecosystem’s value chain.
Given the fact though that more and more laws are being defined for the current hot topic of issuance providers, it can be expected that it won’t take governments too long to put similar rules for secondary markets in place and enable the companies to take a huge step forwards.


