Announcing Trustee Partner: Sterling Trustees
Building a distributed marketplace for asset management services
If you want to reliably tokenize assets, you need a way to establish beneficial ownership in a way that’s recognized by both blockchains and legal-financial authorities.
At TrustToken, we’re creating a platform for clients to tokenize any asset by placing it in a SmartTrust. To establish legal representation on behalf of those assets, users can select a trust company to manage those assets from an open market of professional fiduciaries. Part of TrustToken’s role in establishing this market of fiduciaries is to seed the market with experienced trust companies that offer a variety of specializations in US states with favorable legal precedence.
As we continue to build the TrustToken Platform, you can anticipate that we’ll announce an increasing number of partnerships with trust companies around the country.
Sterling and TrustToken: A Shared vision
Today, we’re excited to announce Sterling Trustees as a partner with TrustToken.
Sterling is exceptionally positioned to contribute to growing the TrustToken fiduciary marketplace.
Sterling is one of the most active trust companies in South Dakota, providing independent trust management and administrative services for large-value directed trusts, including international investors.
Sterling’s president, Antony Joffe, also serves as chairman of the South Dakota Trust Association. (South Dakota is one of the four most favorable states in the US to establish directed trusts — we’ll explain more later in this post.)
Antony co-founded Wealth Hub Solutions, a software platform for trustees to automate administration paperwork and reduce overhead for trustees.
We look forward to consulting Sterling for guidance on designing useful interfaces for fiduciary asset management, and expanding our network through the South Dakota Trust Association. Eventually, we look forward to offering their legal services as a trusted asset manager on the trust market, among other trust companies.
The secret of South Dakota
Thanks to its favorable regulatory environment, South Dakota is one of the most strategic states in which to establish SmartTrusts. South Dakota offers a number of desirable features for connecting smart contracts to trusts, including:
- Directed trusts: These instructions enable a clear channel of communication between smart contracts and fiduciaries (as the smart contracts serve as “investment and distribution advisors”).
- Perpetual trusts: Once an asset is in a trust, it can stay in the trust forever while its “ownership token” is traded. This removes the need for title insurance and other file-cabinet-based industries where the history of ownership for an asset requires certification after every sale.
- Asset Protection: Once you put an asset in a trust, it is legally shielded from third-party liability (such as litigation or divorce proceedings). At the same time, you still retain control over those assets and enjoy their discretionary benefits.
Bridging blockchains and the legal world, one asset manager at a time
While trust companies are not prominent financial players, they play an outsized role in modern wealth management. By itself, South Dakota currently has over $200 billion assets under management.¹ Trust companies are specifically designed to be trustworthy caretakers and accountants for valuable assets. That’s one reason TrustToken is establishing partners with trust companies in multiple states, in order to expand the options available to clients in the TrustToken network, and distribute the management of assets among multiple states and fiduciaries.
We look forward to working with Sterling Trustees, and more trustee partners around the US, to build a distributed, trustworthy platform for tokenized asset management.
[1] We considered a range of states and are currently focused on Nevada, South Dakota, Wyoming, and New Hampshire.
Want to Learn More?
DISCLAIMER: In consultation with legal counsel, TrustToken reserves the right to change the distribution schedule and/or impose additional restrictions on transfer and resale if necessary to comply with securities laws. You should also review our most recent FAQs and PPM for a more complete discussion of these factors and other risks, particularly under the PPM heading “Risk Factors.”
