Open Collaboration: The Digital Security Repository

By Mike Rogers, CPA, Digital Asset Advisor

Famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen once opined, “Bitcoin at its most fundamental level is a breakthrough in computer science — one that builds on 20 years of research into cryptographic currency, and 40 years of research in cryptography, by thousands of researchers around the world.” Mr. Andreessen eloquently expounded his view of Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin creation, which was itself a branch of countless other’s previous work. Augmate believes in the open culture from which the blockchain community was founded.

Today most of the cryptoasset community is adhering to the open definition of knowledge principle. This concept stems from the belief that “knowledge is open if anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it — subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and openness.” The goal is to create a robust commons in which anyone may participate, and interoperability is maximized.

In our last piece Navigating Tokenland, we stated our intention to actively participate in the digital asset discussion moving forward. Augmate will work with integrity to help establish the principles, standards, and best practices for the cryptoasset market. Keeping that in mind, our team set out to identify areas that still needed to be examined and expounded upon. We initiated this process by first examining the information within the “digital security” repository.

Accessing The Digital Security Repo

Those within the developer community are intimately familiar with the web-based hosting service GitHub Inc. Github.com is “a development platform inspired by the way you work. From open source to business, you can host and review code, manage projects, and build software alongside 31 million developers.” Over the years, Github has become a popular platform for cryptoasset projects, particularly those that are open-source (Ex: Bitcoin and Ethereum).

A repository or “repo” is a directory or storage space where developer projects can live. Github users store mostly code, image, and text files within repositories. We view the publications by other members of the cryptoasset community as information repositories for the industry. Our team recently examined the available data within the public “digital security” repository. We analyzed the contributions by Stephen McKeon, Jesus Rodriguez, Tatiana Koffman, Lou Kerner, Anthony Pompliano, Howard Marks and Carlos Domingo, among others. Augmate highly recommends that our readers take the time to do the same.

We found Your Official Guide to the Security Token Ecosystem by Tatiana Koffman to be both comprehensive and informative. Tatiana holds a JD/MBA and spent the formative years of her career in Mergers and Acquisitions, and Fixed Income Trading. She is a highly respected professional at the forefront of Security Token Offerings (STOs).

The self-described STO nerd’s article begins with an exclamation that a new generation of cryptoassets is upon us. Tatiana states “If 2017 was the year of utility tokens, 2018 will undoubtedly be remembered for the birth of an entirely new eco-system of platforms, exchanges, and funds, all looking to capitalize on the trillion-dollar opportunity that is tokenized securities.” From our professional experience within the cryptoasset industry thus far, Augmate concurs with her position.

Tatiana then sets out to answer the following three questions:

• What are security tokens?
• Why tokenize?
• How to tokenize?

She masterfully articulates a crisp overview of security token issuance platforms, hybrid solutions, exchanges, and upcoming issuances. In a follow-up article, Tatiana explains four of the most common security token structures available to issuers. She also provides a list of lawyers who can offer guidance.

In an effort to participate in and shape this burgeoning industry, “Augmate continues to strive to contribute quality content to the cryptoasset community, with the hope that it will be used as a point of reference for those seeking guidance in the digital world.” After evaluating the information within the digital security repository, we believe that it would be most beneficial to expand upon the area of digital security exchanges.

Our next article All Aboard, will analyze the upcoming shift from traditional security canals to the digital security railway.

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