Good Progress DigiShares is making good progress. Over the past month we have added several new white-label partners who are initiating tokenization activities in their own country. Recent clients work with equity crowdfunding, real estate, and other types of assets. They are based in the US, Europe, and Africa. Several of these will be announced in future newsletters.
At the moment we are seeing very significant interest in our white-label tokenization platform. Our recent partnership with Polymath has spurred further interest and within the next few weeks we expect to announce a partnership with another industry leader. One of the great benefits of the security token industry is that everyone collaborates on developing the value proposition, putting together the pieces of the ecosystem, and improving the joint marketing into the traditional financial industry.
For those that do not know, DigiShares provides a white-label tokenization platform for issuance, corporate management, and internal trading. We differentiate by having an attractive white-label partnership model, as well as sophisticated functionality for share cap table management, investor portal, OTC trading, and investor corporate management. We work with legal partners to provide a turn-key offering and can normally set up a new white-label platform within 1 month.
Protocols Still more than 90% of all tokenization occurs on the Ethereum blockchain, despite poor performance and high gas fees. To avoid high fees, tokenization providers are forced to adopt inferior designs such as the omnibus approach to wallet management where all tokens of all investors in a single project are stored in the same wallet. This eliminates many internal transactions for transfers and trades and cuts the gas fee for these transactions down to zero. Only in the case where the investor removes his/her tokens to an external wallet, will there then be actual gas fees. The token industry is slowly converging to protocol standards that are open, flexible and inexpensive to use. As a Polymath partner, we are rooting for ERC-1400 and will also support Polymath’s forthcoming non-Ethereum based protocol Polymesh.
New Territories One of the reasons for the sudden explosion in the tokenization space is most likely the increased regulatory openness to tokenization. More and more regulators are interested in supporting tokenization and are increasingly clarifying how securities and associated transactions can be digitized and completed without touchpoints to banks, CSDs, notaries, the tax department, etc.
DigiShares is constantly monitoring the development of global regulation and currently supports tokenization in these countries:
USA: primarily out of Wyoming and Delaware
Singapore
Switzerland
Liechtenstein
Estonia
The UK
Germany
More countries are being added to the list every month. We are involved in dialog with regulators in several countries in order to fast forward the regulatory process. If you are interested in our help for this, please reach out.
In those countries where tokenization is not yet fully legally clarified, there are other options for how to proceed. One is to use the DigiShares solution without tokenization and just use it to manage uncertificated shares – essentially the share cap table then determines the ownership of the shares and it will be managed by the company admin via the DigiShares platform. So, investors will initially not get tokens and will have to wait for legalization before these can be issued. The other solution is to work with another instrument such as debentures or bonds. These are less demanding on the regulatory side and possible in many more jurisdictions. However, the investor interest may not be as high as for pure equity.
« The security token market cap grew by over 500% in 2020, and the best is still yet to come. I believe this number will continue to grow significantly, reaching over two billion dollars by the end of the year. As larger institutional firms continue to enter into the security token industry, I think we’ll see funds enter this space in a big way in 2021. I predict that over $100M will be raised by security token offerings this year. Worldwide exposure to real estate, private equities, and the hundreds of other security token use cases including art, luxury cars, and sports teams is now possible» The Security Token Industry in 2021
Tokenization is the concept of representing the ownership of securities (company equity, bonds, etc.) as tokens on the blockchain. These tokens are called security tokens, tokenized securities, or increasingly digital assets or digital securities.
Real estate is the single biggest asset class that may be tokenized. Total real estate is worth around $228 trillion today and only 7% of this is available to retail investors. However, more than 80% of people believe real estate to be a good investment. DigiShares aims to help close this gap.
The blockchain itself is a global network that allows individuals and business entities to transact directly with each other in an efficient and inexpensive manner, without using intermediaries as banks and notaries. With tokenization, real estate assets can be represented as tokens on the blockchain that will become as efficient and inexpensive to issue, transfer and trade as other cryptocurrencies.
Tokens on the blockchain can be self-custodied. This means that investors can safekeep their own assets in their own wallet (similar to a bank account on your mobile device or computer). Or they can choose a custodian to safekeep their assets. Custodians are like banks as they provide safe and insured storage of digital assets. However, they are compatible with the blockchain, provide APIs, and are generally quite inexpensive.
Tokens on the blockchain can also be transferred and traded in a peer-to-peer fashion. This means that any investor can directly transfer or trade with any other investor. The transaction itself does not need to be mediated by any middleman (bank, CSD, notary, etc.) but the blockchain itself makes sure that the transaction is settled correctly. The blockchain can even remove any counterparty risk, something that normally requires an expensive intermediary, such as an escrow account with a lawyer. The direct trading removes a lot of friction and makes securities processing on the blockchain highly secure, efficient and inexpensive.
Real estate is highly illiquid but through tokenization, it becomes possible to directly transfer and trade real estate assets to other investors in a very inexpensive and efficient manner. Platforms such as the one provided by DigiShares make this possible and maintains a fully updated share cap table at all times.
Real estate processes are also traditionally very cumbersome and paper-based, involving a lot of manual steps with banks, notaries, etc. With blockchain-based processing of real estate assets, it becomes possible to digitize and automate many of these processes to a much higher degree. With a platform such as the one from DigiShares, these processes can be fully automated:
– Registration of new investors and collection of required information. The actual verification of this can be outsourced to a third-party KYC provider for USD 2-3 per check
– Purchase of shares and investment into the property. The purchase process can be fully automated, allowing the transaction to occur with no manual processing at all. The share cap table is automatically updated after the purchase is completed
– Payment of dividends and interest. By clicking a single button, it becomes possible to pay out to all investors at once, based on a predefined allocation formula
– Trading of digital assets. DigiShares provides a built-in OTC marketplace where investors can trade with each other. No manual processing or participation from the real estate administrator is required.
The very high degree of automation makes it possible to have hundreds of investors in real estate projects unlike today where the number of investors is often limited to below 10. This in turn makes it possible to “fractionalize” and allow investors to participate with $1,000 or $10,000 size investments.
Only a few “accredited” investors may have the normally required $100,000 or EUR 100,000 to invest into a real estate project, but many more investors may have $10,000 or EUR 10,000 to participate. This opens up the market to new types of investors for the real estate developers and it will become easier to finance good projects.
It also allows a much higher percentage of the population to participate in real estate investments and develop a more professional investment strategy to diversify and protect their savings over the years. This is called “democratization” of real estate.
With the DigiShares white-label platform, real estate developers will get a structured platform that enables them to expedite and manage processes related to financing, refinancing, or selling real estate development projects. In addition, they will be able to efficiently and consistently manage a group of owners of a specific project with all that entails – the maintenance of the share cap table, the facilitation of shareholder meetings, the payment of dividends or interest, and the reissuance of lost tokens, etc.
If you are interested in learning more, please contact DigiShares at [email protected]
We are proud to announce that we were accepted out of 200 applicants to the F10 Acceleration Program (from Venture to Unicorn), facilitated bySIX, the Swiss stock exchange.
The F10 Acceleration Program, which premiered with its first cohort in 2020, aims to facilitate POCs, pilots and other collaboration between some of the most innovative Startups and Swiss banks, insurance companies and the Swiss stock exchange SIX. It is the door opener for post-seed Startups, helping them succeed in the Swiss ecosystem and boost innovation for F10 Corporate Partners – to build the financial and insurance services of tomorrow. Participating Startups will be supported by high-caliber Mentors and Investors at F10 in Zurich and will also increase chances to gain exposure in the Spanish and Singaporean ecosystem. It is the goal of DigiShares to use the acceleration program to initiate collaboration projects with F10 corporate partners with a focus on real estate tokenization. DigiShares views the F10 program as the top blockchain and fintech related acceleration program world-wide.
«This program is a cornerstone of our collaboration with our Corporate Partners.» says Gerrit Sindermann, General Manager and Country Success Lead Switzerland, «our team and involved Corporate Partners have thus been very demanding in the selection process, and our expectations are accordingly very high.”
About F10 F10 is a global innovation ecosystem with offices in Zurich, Singapore, Madrid, Barcelona. With its incubators and accelerators covering the fields of FinTech, InsurTech, RegTech and DeepTech, F10 supports and guides startups in transforming their ideas into successful companies while stimulating collaboration with international organizations.
Our founding partner has been SIX, a global financial infrastructure provider and operator of the Swiss and Spanish stock exchanges. It has since been joined by a growing number of leading banks, insurances, consulting and tech firms.
About DigiShares DigiShares is one of the leading providers of white-label tokenization platforms for real assets, combining financing, corporate management, and trading in an end-to-end solution. Our solutions enable asset owners and fund managers to digitize and automate processes, to reduce administrative cost, to reduce the ticket size to fractionalize and democratize and enable retail investors to participate, and finally to provide a huge increase in liquidity through the built-in marketplace that enables shareholders to trade their assets.
In this interview, DigiShares CEO Claus Skaaning discusses the coming together of traditional finance and blockchain, how security tokens open up assets to a broader pool of investors, and why large physical assets like real estate are a prime target for tokenization.
Tokenization has the potential to unlock trillions of dollars in liquidity, in part by bringing thousands of ordinary traders to assets typically reserved for big-money investors. But with such great potential comes the need for the right technologies and regulatory approach to enable greater adoption of security tokens. Tools need to take full advantage of blockchain digitization and automation in ways that are compliant with legislation.
Polymath (P): What are the missing pieces needed to bridge traditional finance and blockchain technology? Claus Skaaning (CS): I actually believe the pieces are falling into place. 2020 has seen massive interest in digital assets from issuers, and I expect that 2021 will see a massive increase in tokenization projects. One of the missing pieces has been regulation. Now we’re seeing more and more jurisdictions clarifying legislation related to tokenization, adopting the stance that a “tokenized security” is just a digital security that exists as a token on the blockchain. They’re also recognizing that tokenization can be handled not by adding new legislation but by slightly modifying and updating existing legislation to support digitized processes and documents.Also, we’re increasingly seeing banks interested in what we’re doing. Swiss banks are now becoming digital asset custodians and the first Swiss bank has announced their own tokenization platform. Some digital asset custodians are extending their services to cover fiat, essentially becoming neobanks. All of this makes it easier for investors to be onboarded into the world of digital assets.
P: What are the business benefits of using blockchain to issue securities and manage cap tables over traditional methods? CS: Blockchain digitizes and automates processes related to issuance, governance, compliance, and trading to a much higher degree than we see today–which yields major efficiency improvements and cost reductions.These benefits suddenly make it cost-efficient and realistic to accept 10,000 investors into a real estate project instead of just 10 or 100, and to offer these 10,000 investors the ability to trade digital assets peer-to-peer. That just isn’t possible without blockchain technology.Cap table management benefits as well. Because the cap table is read directly off the blockchain, it can be kept up-to-date and doesn’t need to be manually updated or maintained. Even when trades are done peer-to-peer, the built-in smart contracts can automatically update the cap table.
P: What makes large physical assets (real estate, infrastructure, solar, wind, etc.) ideal for tokenization? CS: They represent one of the largest single asset classes suitable for tokenization. Global real estate is worth $228 trillion and only 7% of that is available for retail investment, whereas more than 80% of investors view real estate as a good investment. Tokenization could help to close that gap.Insurance and the ongoing corporate management of these types of assets are traditionally paper-based, time-consuming and inefficient. There’s a lot of potential for digitization and automation. Also, these assets are very illiquid as there are very few, if any, efficient ways to trade them, whereas tokenization enables peer-to-peer trading in a very cost-efficient manner. P: Real estate is the largest physical asset category right now. How do you envision tokenization changing the market over the next 10 years? CS: Real estate will become much more accessible for retail investors than it is today. Today real estate investment is primarily the playground of accredited and experienced investors with at least $100,000 USD to spare. With tokenization, real estate assets will become much more liquid and it will become standard practice for most assets to be immediately tradeable. Whether there will be sufficient demand for real estate assets to create real liquidity remains to be seen.
DigiShares, the end-to-end white label platform for tokenized securities, has joined the Polymath Service Provider Ecosystem. This collaboration gives Polymath users access to DigiShares’ cap table management tool and token sale platform.
“There is enormous potential in tokenizing assets—particularly large physical assets like real estate—and having the right technology is critical for increasing adoption,” said Claus Skaaning, CEO of DigiShares. “We very much like the open ecosystem Polymath is creating around the ERC 1400 standard and the Polymesh blockchain initiative, and are excited to be working together to make the world of securities faster, more liquid and more transparent.“
ERC 1400 is a flexible, open source security token standard created byPolymath to bring consistency to how assets are created and handled on the Ethereum blockchain. Because ERC 1400 has been so widely adopted, Polymath has been able to gather market feedback and use the foundation established by the standard to create Polymesh, the first blockchain built specifically for security tokens.
The Polymath Service ProviderEcosystem brings together custody agents, broker-dealers, legal firms, token sale platforms, cap table management providers, KYC/AML providers, and others who can help users create and manage their token.
By joining the ecosystem, DigiShares —who has already collaborated with Polymath on a Wyoming-based project with a real estate company—has integrated ERC 1400 and can onboard tokens created using the standard without additional technical due diligence.
“Real estate tokenization has been getting a lot of buzz lately, but prospective issuers need specialized tools to go to market,” said William Vaz-Jones, Director, Partnership Development at Polymath. “DigiShares focuses on bringing efficiency to the token sale and cap table management processes to make tokenizing property easier and more effective.”
Many have described how we will soon be tokenizing many different types of assets [1], [2], [3] and indeed longer term tokenizing the entire world [4], [5], tokenization being understood as “the act of representing the ownership of an asset or a security as a token on the blockchain”, enabling assets and securities to be transferred and traded more efficiently, securely, transparently, less expensively, and in a more decentralized manner.
Now that we are nearing Christmas, the natural question arises – how can tokenization help Santa deliver his gifts. And who better to explore this topic than Santa’s namesake, the CEO of DigiShares.
Santa’s challenges have been convincingly described by David Mikkelson in his seminal extrapolation of the physics of Santa and his reindeer [6]. Mikkelson describes how Santa in the space of 31 hours has to deliver presents to 92 million homes, assuming there is at least one good child in each, approximately 823 visits per second. The total trip is at least 120 million kilometers long and since it must be completed in 31 hours, Santa’s sleigh must move at extreme supersonic speed of at least 1000 kilometers per second.
The sleigh, having to carry 92 million presents, must weigh at least 321,000 tons (assuming small presents). Santa has eight reindeer (Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen) which will each drag around 40,000 tons. It is speculated that Santa may have two more reindeer including Rudolph. In case this is true, the 10 reindeer will “only” drag around 3,200 tons each, still a significant amount considering that conventional reindeer can drag a maximum of 140 kilograms in a sleigh over frozen ground.
Mikkelson describes in detail how the movement of 321,000 tons of presents at extreme supersonic speeds through the Earth’s atmosphere will result in gigantic sonic booms and an enormous ball of fire at temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius. Being in the midst of such an inferno cannot be very pleasant for Santa.
But why don’t we see if we can help Santa with tokenization? After all, the presents are assets, right? If the presents are tokenized, we can help Santa in a multitude of ways. As with any other asset, the transfer of ownership would be optimized and a number of other positive effects would kick in. Santa could simply tokenize the 92 million presents, creating a unique token for each present, that could then easily and comfortably be transferred directly to the wallets of the good children.
The currently most popular blockchain for tokenization is Ethereum. Using the Ethereum blockchain as a medium for Santa’s business would pose some difficulty, however. Ethereum is limited to 15 transactions per second, meaning that only 7,440 tokenized presents could in fact be delivered in 31 hours. Fortunately, a competing blockchain for tokenization, Stellar, can handle upwards of 10,000 tps, and would relatively easily be able to transfer all of the presents within the allotted time.
So clearly it is a no-brainer for Santa – tokenization of the presents can result in a massive reduction in energy consumption and discomfort for himself and the reindeer. But that’s not all. The tokenization also provides increased transparency as it will be evident to everyone who received presents and who didn’t (no more checking twice who’s naughty or nice) – and potentially which presents were received by which children. The tokenization also provides increased security around the whole process as the risk of mix-ups (wrong present to wrong child) is almost eliminated.
Finally, the tokenization makes it possible for Santa to consider decentralizing his distribution network, enabling third parties to participate in the creation and purchasing of presents as well as the actual transfer of presents to the good children. Parents are obvious candidates for taking over parts of Santa’s task in a controlled fashion within Santa’s tokenized distribution network.
One of Santa’s young (but perhaps not always good) “children” is the security token industry, perhaps 3-4 years old at this stage. If the security token industry could write a wish list to Santa, it would probably contain these top three these wishes: regulatory clarity (“peace”) across the world, an increased number of operational security token exchanges, and finally some visibly successful large scale STOs.
If the tokenization of Christmas catches on, it could also be considered to tokenize Christmas trees, after all there are several projects concerned with tokenizing large forests and as everybody knows one of the benefits of tokenization is that you can fractionalize – so why not fractionalize a forest down to a single tree?
Best Christmas wishes from all of us at DigiShares.
DigiShares provides a tokenization platform that handles all processes relating to the tokenization of any asset such as real estate, renewables, expensive art, film production, presents, etc. If Santa is interested in discussing a collaboration with DigiShares, we’ll surely give him a big discount in the spirit of Christmas.
What is blockchain? What is tokenization? What are the benefits of tokenization? Why is it relevant to real estate?
DigiShares provides a white-label tokenization platform for real estate. In this article we will explain blockchain and tokenization and how the use of these technologies can provide real value for the real estate industry.
Blockchain, Real Estate, and Tokenization Tokenization is the concept of representing the ownership of securities (company equity, bonds, etc.) as tokens on the blockchain. These tokens are called security tokens, tokenized securities, or increasingly digital assets.
Real estate is the single biggest asset class that may be tokenized. Total real estate is worth around $228 trillion today and only 7% of this is available to retail investors. However, more than 80% of people believe real estate to be a good investment. DigiShares aims to help close this gap.
Real estate can be tokenized in different ways. Mostly, it is done by tokenizing the equity of the company that owns the real estate project by financing a new development or refinancing an already existing yield-generating property. So, for the purpose of this blog article, we are primarily considering company equity when referring to tokenized securities.
The blockchain itself is a global decentralized ledger (or more easily understood a database or excel sheet). The blockchain incentivizes participants to maintain consensus about the contents of this database and massively disincentivizes cheating. One way of cheating is to “double spend”, i.e., spending 1 unit of digital currency twice to purchase twice as much as you can afford and hence cheating one of the sellers out of their payment. With blockchain technology, the infamous “double spending” problem was solved for the first time thereby enabling us to manage units of digital currencies (as well as digital assets) in a safe and secure manner.
There are many benefits with tokenization, but generally it makes the processing and management of securities much more efficient and less expensive. Transactions can increasingly occur from peer-to-peer without intermediaries who mainly provide value by maintaining centralized ledgers or databases guaranteeing ownership and value. With the blockchain taking over this task, these intermediaries can be removed from the process enabling investors to transact in an x10 faster and less expensive fashion.
Efficiency Improvements Benefits of tokenization fall into three categories: efficiency (time & cost) improvements, new capabilities, and other values. All of these benefits are relevant to the real estate industry. Efficiency improvements and new capabilities such as trading and fractionalization are probably the most important to the real estate industry.
In terms of efficiency improvements, the main benefit is the general ability to digitize and automate processes.
Having securities in a digital format makes it possible to work with these securities programmatically. They can exist in users’ own wallets and can exist independently of a bank. Marc Andreesen’s famous quote, “Software is eating the world”, refers to the fact that every time an industry becomes software-enabled it leads to a huge efficiency increase and a huge amount of new innovation. The same happens in the world of securities. Tokenized securities are embellished with so-called “smart contracts” – small computer programs that regulate the properties and actions of the security. These smart contracts can be constructed to regulate governance and compliance. They can, for instance, independently determine whether a security can be transferred to a specific buyer or not, based on the following: KYC/AML of the buyer, whether the maximum number of this type of investor has been exceeded, or the accreditation status of the investor. The automation of these processes results in an x10 efficiency increase, an x10 reduction of cost, and an x10 reduction in human errors.
Peer-to-Peer Trading In terms of new capabilities, tokenization makes it possible to easily support peer-to-peer trading of tokenized securities. This generally is not possible today with existing technologies and only blockchain technology now makes it possible. Listed securities are traded on exchanges and have significant liquidity, but unlisted securities (real estate, SME company equity, energy projects, VC funds, etc.) are generally not tradeable and suffer from extremely low liquidity. This means that investors are accustomed to being locked into these investments for many years, and if they want to sell beforehand, they often suffer a significant liquidity penalty in the sales price.
Inexpensive and efficient liquidity for unlisted securities is a totally new opportunity for investors. It generally didn’t exist before blockchain and tokenization. Specialized secondary trading exchanges are turning up to provide sophisticated trading of security tokens. Companies such as DigiShares provide simpler OTC-like marketplaces that can generally be run independently by the issuers to provide some degree of liquidity within their projects. We envision that in the future real estate developers may run their own trading exchanges to provide liquidity to their investors.
Fractionalization The x10 time and cost improvement enables another new capability, – the ability to fractionalize assets. With the normal complicated and paper-based processes for issuance, management, and trading of unlisted securities, it is uneconomical and prohibitive to involve more than 10-20 investors in each project. However, when processes become digitized and automated and are managed by an investor portal such as the one provided by DigiShares, then it suddenly becomes possible and attractive to involve 100 or even 1,000 investors in each project. The portal automatically handles on-boarding of investors and their purchase of tokens (shares).
The portal also automatically keeps the share cap table (shareholder register) updated in relation to trading activities. This in turn makes it possible to reduce the typical minimum ticket size for real estate projects from USD/EUR 100,000 down to perhaps USD/EUR 1,000 or even 100. This is called fractionalization – the ability to fractionalize assets down to very small sizes.
Democratization Fractionalization in turn leads to democratization. In the US and Asia, most financing rounds for real estate projects are limited to accredited investors for regulatory reasons. In Europe, the regulation is more flexible and most EU member states allow fund-raising up to EUR 5 or 8m from retail investors. In any case, with fractionalization it becomes possible to reduce the ticket size and allow retail investors to participate in the financing round. This is beneficial for the issuer who can now target institutional, accredited, and retail investors. It is also very beneficial for the retail investors who are now able to diversify their portfolios in the same way in which wealthy people have done for many years.
From our talks with many real estate developers, we see that many are truly interested in making a difference and enabling retail investors to participate in their projects. This supports the UN sustainable development goal number 8 – “decent work and economic growth.” It increases the chances for retail investors to build and maintain their savings in an inflationary environment.
Other values introduced by tokenization include global standards and interoperability, secure logging of transactions, and a factor x10 increased design space.
Global Standards and Interoperability As many may interject, digital securities have been around for many years through banks and exchanges. However, the digital securities have only been available through banks and exchanges and have not been able to exist on their own outside of these institutions in people’s own computers or mobile devices. The banks and exchanges have naturally taken payments for their services as guarantors of people’s portfolios and have acted as intermediaries in any securities process charging both fees and imposing delays.
Others may interject that they have been able to partake in crowdfunding platforms and invest small amounts of money into startup projects in the past decade. More recently, real estate projects have been added to this list. Yes, this is true. But since these platforms do not use blockchain technology, they are “siloed” – their version of digital securities is not standardized and cannot exist outside their platform. Users of these platforms will be tied to these platforms alone and will not benefit from a large and booming ecosystem as we see with tokenization.
Within the tokenization space, there are a few dominating standards for tokenized securities and digital assets including ERC-1400 which is used by DigiShares. These standards ensure that an investor who purchased a tokenized share in Denmark can later sell it anywhere else in the world, and an issuer who financed his project with the DigiShares platform can later have his tokens traded on a licensed security token exchange. This provides value to any participant in the tokenization ecosystem and it provides for a 1+1 > 2 equation in which innovations provided by many collaborating industry participants multiply and accelerate the entire industry.
Secure Logging Another great benefit of blockchain and tokenization is the secure logging of all transactions. Due to the nature of the blockchain, historic transactions cannot be modified or deleted and they remain visible forever. This makes the blockchain very suitable for tracking transactions related to securities processing and trading, for accounting, auditing, and also for tax considerations. Personal and private data such as name, address, number of shares, etc., are not kept on-chain, but rather referred to from the tokens and stored in password-protected off-chain documents that can only be accessed by authenticated persons such as the owner and the issuer.
Exponentially Increasing Design Space The most important and long-term benefit of tokenization is the earlier indicated massive new design space opened up by securities becoming digitized, independent, and programmable. This design space increases because we now not only have financial people thinking about securities, but also programmers, software architects, crypto people, and DeFi people. Some examples of the securities that benefit from tokenization include those with voting rights and dividend rights that are dependent upon duration of ownership or other characteristics, designer securities that blend characteristics of equity and bonds, and security tokens with various types of participation rights such as physical access to real estate, etc., etc.
Real Estate Tokenization So, that finally leads to the following question: Why is all this relevant to real estate developers? We see real estate developers being interested in this technology for many reasons including the importance of being first movers and early adopters of new technology. They also understand the importance of being able to digitize and automate many processes related to financing and management of projects and the importance of becoming able to fractionalize and invite new types of retail investors to participate. They are also interested in being able to access the international market and offer investors liquidity in the form of a trading marketplace.
With the DigiShares white-label platform, real estate developers will get a structured platform that enables them to expedite and manage processes related to financing, refinancing, or selling real estate development projects. In addition, they will be able to efficiently and consistently manage a group of owners of a specific project with all that entails – the maintenance of the share cap table, the facilitation of shareholder meetings, the payment of dividends or interest, and the reissuance of lost tokens, etc.
If you are interested in learning more, please contact DigiShares at [email protected]
Tokenize Your Real Estate
Many of our current projects are real estate tokenization projects, and for those of you who are specifically interested in real estate tokenization we have created a special page where you can learn about real estate tokenization and how to tokenize your project.
New Client Signed Up DigiShares is currently seeing a massive interest in our services. We have been successful in establish the company as a leader in the industry with a focus on white-label solutions for tokenization of real assets. We are not a crypto company but rather using blockchain technology internally in our platform in order to facilitate efficient peer-to-peer transactions for purchase, payouts and trading as well as a 100% updated share cap table.
Last week we signed up a new white-label client in South Africa who is focused on private equity financing of later stage startup companies in different industries. Already the two first projects are signed up to be tokenized on the platform and a third is in discussions.
Interview Stobox interviewed our CEO Claus Skaaning – an expert of tokenized securities. In this interview, we discussed the STO hype cycle, real problems of the industry, best industries for tokenization, future of exchanges, and legislation.
DAI conference panel participation Also last week Claus participated on the panel of the Digital Assets Investment Conference, also organized by Stobox. The topic of the panel was “token offering success factors: insights from the field”. The panel was moderated by Kristian T. Sørensen of The Tokenizer, the Danish news outlet focused on tokenization, and other participants were Viktor Viktorov of Reinno and Roel Wolfert of VGRIP.
Real Estate Tokenization Webinar Together with Proptech Denmark, DigiShares is hosting a webinar on real estate tokenization on December 3. It will be 2 – 4 pm CET which corresponds to 7 – 9 am CST (Central Standard Time).
The webinar will introduce the concept of tokenization and present some International and Nordic players in the field. The actual benefits of tokenization to real estate developers will be explained and concrete examples of tokenized real estate projects will be presented.
Speakers will be Claus Skaaning, CEO of DigiShares, as well as Ed Nwokedi, CEO of RedSwan, a US-based leader in real estate tokenization. The two final speakers are now announced and we are proud to present Graeme Moore, Head of Tokenization of Polymath, a leader in the tokenization industry, as well as Tuukka Koroloainen, CEO of APK-Kiintestöt Oy, one of the first Nordic real estate companies considering tokenization.
Real Estate Tokenization Webinar Together with Proptech Denmark, DigiShares is hosting a webinar on real estate tokenization on December 3. It will be 2 – 4 pm CET which corresponds to 7 – 9 am CST (Central Standard Time). The webinar will be recorded for those who cannot participate.
The webinar will introduce the concept of tokenization and present some International and Nordic players in the field. The actual benefits of tokenization to real estate developers will be explained and concrete examples of tokenized real estate projects will be presented.
Tokenization refers to the process of representing real estate assets as tokens on the blockchain. Similar to bitcoin, it enables real estate assets to be freely issued, sold, transferred, and traded in a fully digitized manner. It may potentially enable real estate developers to more easily finance their projects from new types of investors and it will greatly enhance the liquidity of real estate investments through online marketplaces. Tokenization also holds the promise of “democratization” by giving retail investors access to real estate investments with much smaller ticket sizes – EUR 1,000 instead of EUR 100,000.
Speakers will be Claus Skaaning, CEO of DigiShares, as well as Ed Nwokedi, CEO of RedSwan, a US-based leader in real estate tokenization. In addition Graeme Moore, Head of Tokenization at Polymath will be sharing his visions for the future of tokenization, and Tuukka Korolainen from Finland-based real estate developer APK-Kiinteistöt will be giving us a Nordic perspective.
Panel Participation at the Digital Assets Investment Conference
Our CEO, Claus Skaaning, has been invited to be a panelist at the DAI Conference.
The panel discussion will occur on Friday 13th of November between 11:30 – 12:30 CET.
The DAI Conference is organized by StoBox and is focused on new trends in the digital assets industry, such as tokenization and DeFi.
Claus will be a part of the panel discussing “Token Offering Success Factors” together with Kristian T. Sørensen from The Tokenizer and Roel Wolfert from VGRIP.
Interview with our CEO An interview with our CEO, Claus Skaaning, was published on Bitcourier. Read it here.
Alcion SES International, a member of the Blu Swarm Liechtenstein and Swiss-based group of companies, who is a European player in structured financing and funds issuing security tokens, and DigiShares, a leading provider of white-label issuance solutions for digital assets, have agreed to a partnership for consulting clients to create more traditional financing products for investment. Everyone recognizes that STOs are undergoing a period of maturity and careless or rushed projects will hurt the whole ecosystem. Alcion and DigiShares together will be able to bring a higher level of professionalism and institutional experience to help a range of projects.
Claus Skaaning, CEO, DigiShares, states, “Partnering with Alcion is yet another step in the consolidation and strengthening of the security token ecosystem. Alcion is a strong partner that will help give us access to the German speaking countries. Alcion provides a powerful experience in the strategic structuring of capital raises and we are already looking at the first joint projects. We expect that this will strengthen DigiShares’ strategy of becoming a leading provider of white-label tokenization platforms, for tokenization of real estate, infrastructure, energy projects, art, and precious metals.”
Dominic Hoenes, CEO, Alcion SES, said, “Working with DigiShares is a major step forward for Alcion and the team is looking forward to many successful security token launches. DigiShares is a leading token platform, and a critical link in this emerging ecosystem which combines the creativity and energy of new fintech startups with the experience and strength of traditional financial players. Alcion is excited to bring its experience and consulting skills to DigiShares clients and will be excited to bring their smart structured projects to DigiShares.”
Both partners share the common targets to differentiate at an early stage non-performers from projects that meet minimum requirements for onboarding and to support promising STO to improve their probability of success.
About Alcion Alcion is a member of the Blu Swarm Group, and focuses on consulting and structuring projects around the world to make them ready for institutional and professional financing. As part of the Blu Swarm Group, their work supports the development of projects such as fine art, precious metals, real estate and others. Alcion aims to bring the best of the traditional financial world and modern blockchain enabled fintech to every client and uses all resources of BLU SWARM Group.
Alcion brings experience to making your project financially ready. Website: https://alcion.ch
