tZero [1] – the subsidiary of Overstock who is one of the most active players in the STO market – just updated their investors, and whilst this do not make a particularly happy reading it provides good insights into what is, and is not, happening in the STO market at the moment [2,3]. This comes after a very positive update only in June [4], and might be related to real estate tokenisation not delivering as expected [5].
After the podcast on German ship finance I made two weeks ago [1] I have come across another German platform because of an pretty extensive interview in BTC Echo [2] and some other news in German media [5]. It turns out that those guys have been around for a while, there was a very good article on them in February [3] and an even earlier one last October [4], so it might well be that this is part of a concerted media push.
Introduction In this article [1] I want to discuss the dynamics of Ampleforth [2,3], which is a crypto currency with its twist. Instead of issuing a fixed number of units, Ampleforth monetary supply expands and contracts dynamically to keep one Ampleforth valued at around 1 USD. The expansion and contraction is executed in a pro-rata manner, meaning that they do not impact the percentage of overall supply an investor holds. On first sight this looks like a stable coin, but on second sight it is clear that this is not quite the case – it is a regular crypto coin whose price dynamics has been moved to play out in the volume space.
Banque de France selected the firms for its announced CBDC trial [1]. Four out of the eight companies chosen are old economy giants who are venturing into the brave new world, but the remaining four are more recent upstarts: Iznes, LiquidShare, ProsperUS, and SEBA Bank.
It is interesting how technology gives a new lease to old principles. The medieval banking systems relied heavily on bearer instruments to assert ownership of financial assets, and this has over time be replaced with centralised registers. Now we see the rise of a new class of bearer instruments, eg via Corda, or now via CloudCoin which uses a very different – and in many respects much more pedestrian – way of avoiding the double spend problem.
Before we start: this is not a financial promotion, I am in no way related to this token offering, and I have no views whatsoever of whether or not this token is a good investment. With this out of the way, I am excited that there is another major security token offering coming out of Germany, a $50m subordinated debt token for investing into green shipping assets.
The article announcing this is so far only available in German [1], but there is a lot of information on the sponsor’s page [2] and the subscription page [3]. The prospectus has been approved by the FMA Liechtenstein [4].
After its acquisition of Swipe [5], Binance now announced details of the debit card it will be offering first in the EEA and later in the UK [1,2]. And Binance’s CEO is amongst the beta testers [3,4].