Overstock’s Patrick Byrne Says tZERO Will Launch Next Week
【Published by Ennio Y. Lu】
Overstock.com’s (NASDAQ: OSTK) long-awaited tZERO security token trading platform will go live by the end of next week, CEO Patrick Byrne said Friday.
Byrne said the company is “ready to hit the button and go live today,” but was waiting a few more days to process user signups.
“It’s a big moment for us — four years in the making.” Bryne added.
The announcement means tZERO will meet the timetable given last month by Jonathan Johnson, president of Medici Ventures, Overstock’s venture fund and tZERO’s direct parent company. Speaking to CoinDesk in December, he said the company would go live in January.
The company has already notified investors in tZERO’s token sale — which concluded last August — that they can gain access to their tokens.
According to a letter to investors, the three-month lockup period for the tokens had ended, and investors could either create a brokerage account with broker-dealer and tZERO partner Dinosaur Financial Group or put the tokens in a personal wallet.
tZERO will be led by Steven Hopkins, until recently the chief operating officer and general counsel at Medici. Hopkins will serve as tZERO’s president, and the startup is now looking to fill two other executive positions: head of issuance and head of an in-house broker-dealer that will serve tZERO’s retail clients.
The platform will allow trading of its native tZERO token at launch, but is also talking to about 60 different companies. Elio Motors, a company producing light three-wheeled cars, will probably issue the next token traded on the platform, Byrne said.
tZERO is a key asset in Medici Ventures’ portfolio and an ambitious effort to disrupt established security trading practices on Wall Street that Byrne has been famously challenging for more than a decade, such as his fight against naked short selling.
[*Note] Naked short selling, or naked shorting, is the practice of short-selling a tradable asset of any kind without first borrowing the security or ensuring that the security can be borrowed, as is conventionally done in a short sale. Lehman Brothers is one of the victims.
In December, tZERO was hired by Hong Kong-based GSR Capital to create a token for trading cobalt, with GSR also buying $30 million in tZERO security tokens from Overstock. However, the partnership was delayed after GSR asked for additional time to on-board a third partner and close the deal. The deal has yet to be completed, Byrne said Friday.
Also in December, tZERO acquired another company in Medici’s portfolio, crypto wallet startup Bitsy.
Overstock’s initial Alternative Trading System (ATS), a sort of precursor to tZERO, has been open for two years. But it has listed only tokens representing preferred shares in Overstock, and saw little activity (all of 10 trades over a 15-month period) due to technical hurdles, a public filing by Overstock said last spring.
With Sto gradually becoming a trend in emerging financial markets, Tzero, a platform launched by US e-commerce giant Overstock, has been under scrutiny and will be a milestone in the field of blockchain creation if it goes well next week.
■ Source: blocktempo
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