Announcing the Newtown Partners Token Portal
We’re excited to announce a new project that we’ve been working on — our new Token Portal!
The Newtown Partners token portal is a state of the art portal for companies backed by Newtown Partners to host their token sales. Due to heavy regulation and ever-increasing expense, it is becoming increasingly difficult for individual projects to run a token sale through their own site. This is why Newtown Partners has launched its own Token Portal. The facility enables our investee companies and backers to:
- Be protected by Civic’s best-in-class technology for identity verification: We are very proud to integrate Civic into our token portal. Using Civic as the registration and login method protects all backers during the signup process and future portal use. Newtown Partners is invested in the decentralised future. While the token portal currently has to utilize a database to comply with Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations, we will move closer to the Web 3.0 way of storage (i.e. decentralisation) as Civic’s functionality develops. Newtown Partners has full confidence in the Civic team. We are working closely with them and believe we will get to this point in the near future.
- Maintain the highest level of security: Following best practices for security measures is expensive and time-consuming. We have taken care of this so our portfolio companies don’t have to re-invent the wheel each time they wish to run a Token sale.
- Ensure that all current regulation regarding token sales is followed: Over the last two weeks, at least five different regulators (FINMA, ASIC, SEC, PBoC, FSS) have issued different statements regarding token sales. For the foreseeable future, we believe the token sale regulatory environment will be uncertain. This uncertainty is best mitigated through a single point that can consult local legal counsel in multiple jurisdictions and quickly react.
- Be assured of the quality of projects on the portal: We have specifically decided against opening this portal to public companies. Currently, as many in the industry agree, there has been a deluge of sub-par token sale offerings. By limiting the portal to our portfolio companies, we ensure that we only list projects that Newtown Partners has backed through equity funding and where we understand and can protect (through escrow and board input) the long-term value of the token. All projects that we list are backed by Newtown Partners.
Our first portfolio company to utilise the new token portal is Wala
Wala is a financial platform aiming to solve financial exclusion affecting 3.5 billion people. Through key partnerships, Wala provides zero-fee access to transactional banking, remittances, loans and insurance for the unbanked and underbanked in emerging markets. Wala will also integrate with Civic, who is solving the challenging issues surrounding identity management.
Wala is the launch partner for a new financial services utility token, Dala, which will be sold and issued in a crowdfunding token sale this October through the token portal.
