The Latest from the Security Tokens Realised event & the tZero Launch
Each week we share the latest news in the Security Token industry. This is newsletter #20 — subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.
This newsletter comes to you a few days later than usual, with the culprit being our attendance at the Security Tokens Realised (STR) event in London.
The London event presented a stark contrast with many other crypto conferences. It had a lot more incumbents (i.e. finance professionals) attending and a lot less hype.
As such, the event saw great discussions on the challenges and future of the security token industry. To share them, we’ve written down some of our insights.
We’d love to hear from our current and new readers what you thought of the event; take a look and leave a comment on our Medium article.
QUOTE
There are two aspects of security tokens that are contradictory. Security tokens cannot be anonymous, because you have to know the kind of investors you’re dealing with. But if you put all the information of your investors on-chain, you’re disclosing everything about them, and they will not want that. So there are trade-offs; you have to engineer a kind of technology that supports both things.
— Codechain’s COO Mi Sun Cho during the STR event in London
NEWS
💱 Just five months after closing their $134 million token sale, tZerolaunched its security token exchange, allowing accredited investors to trade tZero’s own tokens.
💸 Symbiont, a blockchain for enterprise finance, raised $20m in a Series B round. The round was led by Nasdaq Ventures and joined by Citi Ventures, Galaxy Digital and Raptor Group.
🏘️ Tokenized real estate startup RealBlocks raised $3.1 million from Morgan Creek Digital, among others.
⏩ Securitize is joining IBM’s Blockchain Accelerator program in order to expand into the existing finance industry and build a tokenized debt issuance platform.
🌱 Chicago-based crypto exchange Seed CX has launched its platform, specifically targeting institutional traders.
🔒 Tokenization platform Polymath is locking up around $9 million worth of Polymath tokens, to show to they’re in it for the long term.
💱 Zilliqa and MaiCoin are setting up the Taiwanese Hg Exchange. The exchange with an unpronounceable name is planning to be the first in Southeast Asia to offer exchange services for both privately-held shares and tokenized securities.
✈ The Jamaica Stock Exchange has run a successful pilot “demonstrating the complete lifecycle of the digital asset ecosystem”, with the goal of listing security tokens on their platform.
📃 Thailand’s stock exchange plans to acquire a license from the country’s Finance Ministry, in order to start a new digital asset exchange later this year.
⚠️ And more news from Southeast Asia. Singapore’s Monetary Authority warned a security token issuer not to proceed with its offering, as it “failed to comply with the advertising restriction when its legal advisers put out a LinkedIn post accessible to the public”. Whoops.
🇬🇧 The (British) FCA published a consultation paper on cryptoassets, providing its view on how cryptoassets could be classified — as specified investments, financial instruments, e-money, or payment services.
LONGER READS
👛 According to Atomic Capital’s CEO Alexander Blum, digital custody for securities is bogus. Why? We’ll let him tell you.
📝 There’s no such thing as an STO, says Anthony Back from Intrepid Ventures. While we disagree with the title, his article provides a good reality check and demonstrates the challenges the industry has to overcome.
🌐 A very long (but solid) report on security tokens by Newtown Partners. On the security token stack, different types of security tokens, and much more.
NEW STOs
⚕️ Swiss Healthbank is issuing a token representing a share in the Healthbank Cooperative, in order to raise anywhere between 0 and 27.6 million CHF. Very interesting to see a cooperative tokenize itself in this way.
⛓️ Blockchain as a service company edeXa is currently issuing non-voting tokenized shares, aiming to raise a maximum of €4.9 million. They have raised over €500k so far, though the exact terms of the deal are rather unclear.
POSTSCRIPT
As you may have noticed, we changed our securitytoken.it website and redirected it to our Medium blog.
Our online overview of projects in the security token space was getting outdated, and other websites have been doing a better job at this than us.
So instead, we decided to double down on our newsletter, and focus on what’s truly important: more insights, less hype.
That’s it for now, see you next week! 👋
