From Tokens to Investments

Building a Financial Services Business in the Blockchain Age

Back when Funderbeam first revolutionised investing in startups, by delivering liquidity in early-stage investments, we needed to find a term that simplified how we talked about investments and trading, in combination with the innovative Blockchain technology that we use for recording these investments. We settled on the term ‘token’ — easily understood, simple and effective.

However, few people were predicting the emergence of ICOs and growth of crypto assets at that time; and the growth of Funderbeam into new markets was a vision and not yet a reality. With 26 campaigns completed, including equity, convertible, bond and fund syndicates; more than €8.7m raised for companies, and with over €1m of trades executed, it is now time to change the way we present and discuss investments.

Our primary aim is to make it clearer what investments you hold. Now that we offer different products (e.g. bonds, shares, convertibles and loan notes), these are the terms we will use to refer to your investments. So where you may have invested in a campaign using the loan-based SPV structure, you will now see your investment described as Loan Notes (which is what the investment actually is), rather than Tokens. If you hold shares in a company directly, we will use this term (shares), rather than tokens. Nothing else is changing other than the name — it is starting to call shares, ‘shares’ and bonds, ‘bonds’, instead of naming them all collectively securities.

Of course, there is no change to the nature of your investments, we only are updating how they are described on our platform. And we’re still using Blockchain as the technological solution to record ownership of assets held on our platform. It’s a natural evolution of our business as we become a global financial services company.

Please feel free to contact us at hello@funderbeam.com if you have any questions or concerns.