It’s exciting to know that we have helped facilitate a larger market movement. A significant market shift that will see most assets moved onto the blockchain. It was only last week when the current SEC Chairman said that:
It was INX who spent the past 2.5 years working with all levels of the SEC to get us to this point. You have to understand that before our F-1 prospectus, security tokens were a sleepy backwater in financing; relegated to Regulation D and A+ registrations, that had limited market caps and even more limited market participation and liquidity. With these characteristics it was no surprise that Security Tokens had limited success when they were first introduced to the world.
I think we can all agree that if a product is designed for only the wealthy, it is unlikely to be able to transform the whole economy, in the same way as a Ferrari will never go mainstream, perhaps a Tesla Model 3 will. Affordability and access brings more folks to the table, and so, by creating and molding a security token with the regulators, we were able to create a registered token that could bring mass adoption, scalability and access.
The INX token design allows for access to all. It has no lockup. The minimum is de minimis, and the initial offering price is the same whether you drive a Ferrari or a Honda. It is a ground floor opportunity for investors from all walks of life to back our company and participate in what we, and apparently the SEC, believes will be a significant migration of assets from traditional exchanges to digital.
There are three distinct audiences who are leading this migration.
Firstly the regulators, who are enamored by the autonomous KYC/AML smart contract and whitelisting, and who covet the ability to know who owns which asset and where. The blockchain ensures transparency.
Secondly, issuers. Yes, issuers would prefer to list digitally because of the inherent cost savings. No third parties to shave off dividend payments before they arrive in investor bank accounts. The ability to see their cap table at any moment in time. The ability to list in different geographies with a few lines of code, rather than a few lines of lawyers around the block!
Finally, from consumers. The consumer is very important. It is the consumer that is already enjoying fractional ownership through Robinhood. It is the consumer who demands 24/7 trading, especially the younger consumer who doesn’t understand why markets close at 4pm, only to open the next day at 9.30am… An open and close system based on newsflow and a floor trading system that was retired many years ago. With prices trading electronically, and 24-hour newsflow thanks to Twitter, the days of an open and close are limited to say the least.
The millennial generation is also the Amazon generation. They demand delivery immediately. They are also digital savvy. In fact a Charles Schwab study showed that in their top five equity holdings was GBTC — the bitcoin tracking equity — they owned more of that than Netflix. This is also the generation that will inherit the largest wealth transfer in history as Baby Boomers pass.
The new day for investing is here, and INX wrote the Security Token F-1 to get it started. We now offer an investment for everyone to participate, with us, in this digital revolution.
To get a greater sense of our vision for digital assets please check out our videos here.
To subscribe to the INX Token IPO please visit token.inx.co
And for more information on the company please visit inx.co
About the author:
Mr. Douglas Borthwick is Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer of INX Services. Mr. Borthwick has over 25 years of experience in the finance industry, most recently founding and building the Chapdelaine FX electronic and voice trading business for inter-dealer broker TP-ICAP from 2012 to September 2018. Mr. Borthwick held various roles with Morgan Stanley from 1996 through 2005; managing foreign exchange derivatives trading groups in New York and London, with a strong focus on emerging markets. He then ran the strategic trading desk at Merrill Lynch from 2005 to 2006, and the Latin American FX trading business at Standard Chartered from 2006 to 2009. In 2010, Mr. Borthwick managed trading and research areas for startup foreign exchange agency, Faros Trading, a company that was later sold to FXCM in 2013. Mr. Borthwick holds a bachelors of science in Economics from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from Yale University’s School of Management.
