Introducing Finhash Network: A New Website on Blockchain & Finance
Let us tell you a story. It’s mid 2018, and the ICO Wild West has come to an end. Market prices fell dramatically, and people are looking for new ways to invest their money. And slowly but surely, people in the crypto space started to familiarize themselves with a new concept: Security Token Offerings — or STOs.
At our boutique consultancy Infloat, we had been working on STOs since 2017. But it wasn’t until that time, that we saw a gap in the market. The ‘STO’ or tokenized security space was developing fast, but it was difficult to wrap your head around the concept.
For many people, it wasn’t just the question of ‘What is an STO?’, but also: ‘Which companies are issuing a tokenized security?’.
A First Attempt at Providing an Ecosystem Overview: STO-Map
Simply put, there wasn’t any good overview available of specific security token issuers. With this in mind, we started STO-map. We aimed to provide any reader with a solid overview of companies active in this specific crypto niche. We covered security token exchanges, issuance platforms, venture capital firms, and many more projects active in this niche.
The early versions of STO-Map did fairly well. The website received significant traffic, which showed that this need indeed existed. However, it was a bit of a pain to keep the website up to date — and we weren’t satisfied with the way things were going. In addition, other projects like STOCheck were doing (and are still doing) a great job, and have taken this a step further since then.
The Latest News on Security Tokens
Simultaneously, we saw that there wasn’t just a gap in terms of a project overview, but also a gap in terms of news. Surely, websites such as Coindesk provide great sources of news. But these websites are for the masses, and don’t specifically focus on the tokenized securities niche. And at that time, even larger companies such as Securitize or the now popular Security Token Group, did not yet offer a comprehensive overview of security token-related news.
So to fill this second gap, we created a weekly newsletter called SecurityToken.it. The initial idea was to share news and insights related to tokenized securities, to anyone who was interested. The name was straightforward, and we rebranded our STO-map website to SecurityToken.it.
Slowly but surely, we moved more and more towards not just covering news related to tokenized securities, but also news related to other topics that interested us. This included blockchain applications in large financial corporates, or even Decentralized Finance. Both highly interesting topics that do not directly relate to ‘security tokens’.
From SecurityToken.it to Finhash Network
That’s why just a month ago, we decided to change our focus. We did not just want to cover tokenized securities anymore, but discuss all kinds of applications of blockchain technology within the financial sector. Unfortunately, this left us with a name (SecurityToken.it) that did not really fit what we were doing. And while a newsletter is great, it’s not easy to acquire new readers if you don’t actively promote your content online.
And while Medium is a great… well… medium, it is fairly restrictive in what you can and cannot do — and does not allow us to create innovative overviews such as the ones we are creating on our new website.
Finhash Network: On Finance and Blockchain
So without further ado, we present to you our new website and brand: Finhash Network.
With Finhash, we’ll continue covering the finance and blockchain space like we already do. We’ll continue writing our newsletter every week (sign up here if you didn’t already), but also start providing more insights and longer reads into blockchain and finance.
One of these longer reads is live already: An overview of different projects in Decentralized Finance: From KYC protocols to prediction markets and from custodial services to stablecoins.
And over the weeks to come we’ll start publishing other articles and insights— covering relevant podcasts and books, insights from our work on the use of blockchain in securities transactions, and much more. The goal of all of this is to create a full and comprehensive network of insights, overviews and content related to blockchain and finance.
A Request to Our Readership
But before we end this article and shut down the SecurityToken.it Medium blog, we have a request for you, our readers. In order to create this great new source of information on blockchain and finance, we need your help. We can’t do it alone, so we’re looking for people with experience in the blockchain/finance niche.
Specifically, we are looking for guest authors, who can be named or stay anonymous and simply want to share their insights with the world.
So if you’re interested in writing with Finhash, please send us an email at contact+finhash@infloat.co. And thanks for all your support!
Thoughts, questions, comments? Leave them below, email us, and of course — sign up for the newly (re-)launched Finhash newsletter (if you’re not signed up already).
