The Security Token Offering weekly #2
Yes, we still haven’t come up with a better name.
Another cataclysmic week of doom for all things stable & utility. While the security industry’s suited up lawyers are full steam ahead, no one really knows what the f**k is happening.
But hey, we can at least pretend.
Industry
A look at this week’s industry advancements.
OpenFinance opens for business.
OpenFinance Network (OFN) is moving from beta to full trading functionality, becoming the first to launch a live, regulated security token trading platform in the United States. An experienced and trusted player in the alternative assets space since 2014, OFN developed its regulated and efficient trading platform to make security token trading more liquid and accessible.
This is great news for the US’s security tokens scene. While the rest of the world was cruising through the ICO market, the American’s had to come up with legitimate compliant solutions to navigate the SEC. This has come to fruition with OpenFinance and the current US security token stack.
Securitize (Tech) + Harbor (Issuance) + OpenFinance (Liquidity) = A full service US Stack.
Their Go-to-market listing is the industry veteran Blockchain Capital. This makes quite a lot of sense, an ETF is arguably the easiest thing to represent both legally and technologically. The Tokens themselves don’t have to do much, other than represent a share that’s legally bound to the LLC/SPV in some way.
It’ll be interesting to see how much liquidity pours in and at what premium these close-end funds trade at.
On a more meta-level, it’s of my opinion that starting with ETFs is the absolute best way to go as an industry.
They’re very straight forward, but also allows institutionals and those with one toe in the water to instantly access diversification and sophisticated deal flow, without doing anything, really. Much unlike businesses or real estate, fund’s value propositions and mandates are much clearer and easier to understand.
Enterprise level Growth Hacks
Ever wondered how one can Growth Hack an incredibly boring service such as token issuance? Look no further!
Atomic Capital has officially released an open source digital security readiness checklist to facilitate compliant and successful digital security issuances.
Yes, that’s right, a readiness check-list. I’m actually surprised that people spend PR $ on this kind of thing. But you know, you do you, Atomic.
Honestly, this will probably be useful to a bunch of companies entering the space, as well as a pretty decent traffic funnel for inbound requests for Atomic Capital.
It’s great to see people actually spending time and resources on things like this, it’s only going to better the future of the industry.
Instability for Stable Coins.
For no apparent reason other than ‘Legal troubles’, the $133 million stable coin project, Basis, is shutting its doors.
The firm, which raised $133 million in funding, ran into regulatory headwinds as it attempted to get its algorithmic stablecoin off the ground, said multiple people with direct knowledge of the situation. As a result, Basis is shutting down operations and returning the majority of capital raised to investors.
2019 will apparently be the year of stablecoins. That’s right, coins pegged to the USD, because, you know, we need that. Not dApps adoption or proper regulated representation of stakes. Stablecoins.
Of course, I’m not a big VC fund, so what do I know.
The Mill.
Opinions and debates, what’s really going on?
Four days trapped at Sea.
In 10 years of political reporting I’ve met a lot of intense, oddly dressed people with very specific ideas about what the perfect world would look like, some of them in elected office — but none quite so strange as the ideological soup of starry-eyed techno-utopians and sketchy-ass crypto-grifters on the 2018 CoinsBank Blockchain Cruise.
The Crypto industry sucks for women. I could elaborate, but the author of this piece has done it far better than I ever could.
Brits buy Bitcoin or lose everything!!
Okay, Keiser.
You’ll get $1.27 for every £1 you have. In January it was more like $1.41. Kinda like Bitcoin, it’s dropping like a brick.
Just when you thought cash was safe…
What’s going on with BCT?
The Bitcoin cash terminal. The Bloomberg terminal for crypto, has had quite the controversy recently. Action groups have been set up and syndicates aren’t happy, but why?
Two identities, one man: the story of $800 million hedge fund fraudster Boaz Manor who led the alleged $31 million Blockchain Terminal ICO
Yes, apparently who everyone knew as Shaun, wasn’t actually Shaun.
Where there’s smoke there’s fire. The author of this piece (Linked below) goes on to write a pretty damning argument for why the entire setup is a scam.
But there’s always two-sides to every story.
Even I, with my own eyes, have physically held and seen their product. Spoken to their sales. Even before their ICO, I saw it all working, hearing good things about it.
I became dubious about the original attack piece, as it seemed to be very one-sided, painting a narrative the journalist wanted to portray.
Then this came out:
To be honest, I can’t even really comment. I didn’t want to spend 90 minutes of my life watching this, or even 45 minutes on 2X speed.
The consensus at this point seems to be ‘Let’s just see what the product is like first’.
I don’t care enough about any of this to comment either way, I just felt like it was pretty juicy.
See you before Christmas
Hopefully Santa brings up unilateral working groups, collaborative efforts on protocols and $10k Bitcoin. I’d be happy just to get some socks, at this point.
